Mark Tabata’s Weekday Devotionals
Wednesday, September 30
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Hebrews 11:6-But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
For nearly all of my life, I have been an avid fan of scientific research and education. A large percentage of the books in my private library (hardback, paperback, and e-book) are written by scientists from various disciplines and backgrounds. Perhaps some of my favorite books are those written by scientists who were former atheists and/or agnostics who then became followers of Jesus through the influence of their own particular branch of research.
Enter Dr. Alfred Basta.
This man is one of the most respected researches in the world. He comes from a background of atheism and extreme hostility to Christianity. Years of study led him to embrace the existence of the God of the Bible. In one of his groundbreaking works, he minces no words in explaining the zeal that he had against Jesus.
I am going to state my opponents’ case at its full strength. I spent twelve years as the best student atheism ever had: not a caricature of a skeptic, not a strawman assembled for the pleasure of knocking it down, but an actual, trained, motivated opponent who wanted very badly to win. When I bring you the problem of evil, I will give it to you the way it was given to me, sharp enough to draw blood, not filed down into something a Sunday school answer could turn aside. When I bring you the case against the reliability of Scripture, or the case for a universe that needs no beginner, or the case that my own grief is nothing but neurochemistry doing what neurochemistry does, I will give you the strongest published version of each, credited to the scholars who built it, before I tell you why I no longer find it sufficient. A case that only defeats weak opponents proves nothing except that its author is skilled at arguing with people who are not in the room. I do not want to write that book, and I am telling you here, at the threshold, so that you can hold me to it on every page that follows. (Dr. Alfred Basta, Why I Decided to Believe in God: A Cryptographer’s Twelve-Year Case Against God, Three Graves, and the Evidence That Would Not Break, 2-3 (Kindle Edition): Independently Published)
Throughout his book, Basta investigates a number of scientific, philosophical, historical, and archaeological finds and discoveries which led him to accept the factuality of God’s existence, the inspiration of the Bible, and the Deity of Jesus Christ. The good doctor details twenty-two different arguments that led him to the foot of the Cross.
Here, briefly named, are the twenty-two. The universe began, not a theological assertion but a physical one, resting on the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, proved by cosmologists with no stake in what it implied. Every serious eternal-universe alternative, steady state, oscillation, the multiverse, failed or remains unobserved on its own terms. The constants of physics are calibrated to a precision, the cosmological constant alone correct to roughly one part in ten to the one hundred twentieth power, that no deeper theory has ever explained away. Beneath the constants sits the deeper strangeness of law itself, uniform and stable for no required reason. Beneath law sits the stranger fact that human mathematics, invented at a chalkboard for no practical end, keeps turning out to describe the actual universe. A cluster of astronomical clocks, magnetic decay, lunar recession, cometary mass loss, suggests youth, though I have already told you, in the chapter before this one, exactly how much unresolved tension that cluster still carries. Then the cell: a coded, digitally stored, error-corrected information system, the densest code I have ever examined in three decades of studying codes for a living. The genetic code sits within a hair’s breadth of the mathematical optimum among nearly a million possible alternative codes. A functional protein sequence is buried in a space so vast, one in ten to the seventy-fourth, by Douglas Axe’s own experimental estimate, that blind chemical search across the whole history of the universe is not a plausible way to find it. Molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum require every part present at once to function at all, and twenty years of proposed pathways remain narratives rather than demonstrations. The Cambrian explosion drops nearly every major body plan into the fossil record within a narrow window, with none of the ancestral branching gradualism predicts. Species that do appear tend to sit still for the whole of their existence rather than drift continuously. Soft tissue in dinosaur bone, chemically difficult to reconcile with tens of millions of years. The three unprovable assumptions beneath radiometric dating, and the anomalies that follow when you actually test them. The mathematics of fulfilled prophecy, audited rather than merely asserted. Nearly six thousand Greek New Testament manuscripts, and Bart Ehrman’s own concession that no variant among them touches a major doctrine. The Tel Dan Stele’s confirmation of a house of David that skeptics once called invented. The minimal facts of the resurrection, the crucifixion, the disciples’ costly conviction, the conversions of a skeptical brother and a persecuting zealot, resting on first-century testimony, not on later legend. The sheer, stubborn fact of consciousness, which no third-person vocabulary has ever fully captured. The real, binding force of moral obligation, which no evolutionary account of mere preference has ever fully earned. The excess of beauty over what bare survival required. And last, placed last on purpose, my own grief: the fact that my rage in 1994 was never the rage of a man who believed no one was there to rage at. Twenty-two. Not twenty-two costumes worn by one argument. I tested each one against the others, the way a careful cryptographer tests whether two ciphers secretly share a key: does the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant depend, anywhere, on the manuscript history of the New Testament? It does not. Does the Cambrian explosion’s abruptness depend on the mathematics of Daniel’s seventy weeks? It does not. Each line rests on its own data, gathered by its own methods, capable of failing on its own without dragging its neighbors down with it. That is what independence means, and I did not claim it for these twenty-two lines until I had actually run the test against the pairings most likely to expose me if I was wrong. Here is the part that took me the longest to understand, and I want to give it to you as plainly as I can, because it is the whole reason a cumulative case can do something no single argument, however strong, can do alone. A chain is exactly as strong as its weakest link, and no stronger; a mathematical fact, not a metaphor. Sever one link and the whole chain falls, regardless of how much steel the other links are made of. I spent a decade looking for a chain: one argument for God’s non-existence airtight enough to bear the whole weight of my conviction by itself, the way a theorem bears the weight of its proof. I never found one. What I did not understand, for most of those years, is that the case slowly assembling itself on the other side of the ledger was never a chain at all. It was a rope. Cut one fiber of a rope, even a strong one, and the rope does not fail. It sheds only the fraction of its strength that single fiber was carrying, and it goes on holding what it was holding before. Twenty independent witnesses, each individually only sixty percent reliable, do not average out to sixty percent confidence when their testimony converges. They compound, multiplicatively, into odds in the thousands to one, because that is simply what the mathematics of independent probability does, whether or not our instincts, trained on addition rather than multiplication, are prepared to believe it. I had built my whole case the way a mathematician is trained to build every case, and I had spent a decade testing the other side’s rope as though it were my own chain, declaring victory each time I found a single frayed fiber, never once stepping back far enough to notice that the rope, minus every fiber I had frayed, was still holding the exact weight I kept insisting it could no longer bear. (Dr. Alfred Basta, Why I Decided to Believe in God: A Cryptographer’s Twelve-Year Case Against God, Three Graves, and the Evidence That Would Not Break, 212-214 (Kindle Edition): Independently Published)
I am reminded here of the words of the Apostle Paul, declared so many years ago regarding the factuality of Christianity, when he was declared to be insane for becoming a follower of Jesus.
Acts 26:25-But he said, “I am not mad, most noble Festus, but speak the words of truth and reason.
What are some other evidences which you can cite that demonstrate the truthfulness of the Bible?
Lord, we thank You for the many evidences which You have provided for us upon which we may build our faith.
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