Peter Duran engages in a couple of typical errors in his clarion call to science over superstition. First is the notion that this century is the first where the scientific method, or even logical thought, holds sway in determining truth.

Does he forget that many of the fundamental scientific and mathematical concepts were originated in ancient Greece?

Archimedes, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle: these were not men who shunned experiment or observation in reaching their conclusions. In fact, they established that methodology as the bedrock of Western philosophical and scientific inquiry.

The modern scientific method was developed and refined in Catholic universities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Let’s not forget that Copernicus was a monk.

The notion that we in the 20th-21st centuries are somehow endowed with a higher ability to discern truth is called “chronological snobbery.” People who evince this view naturally assume that we are better people than we were 50, 100, 500 years ago.

However, they tend to ignore that the same blind faith in science and man’s power of reason were hallmarks of such lovely ideologies as Communism and Nazism.

In other words, we of the last 100 years have also witnessed the greatest mass murders in history resulting in the deaths of 100 million people, mostly as the result of various regimes implementing “scientific” measures to make a perfect society.

So, perhaps Mr. Duran and his like-minded compatriots need to scale back the hubris a bit and realize that unbounded faith in the human capacity to determine the truth is both foolhardy and dangerous.

Not that I am against the scientific method and the power of man’s reason to discern truth. I believe that God has granted us reason so that we can know him better and more fully appreciate the truths which underly our existence. To wit, we are able to use our reason to understand, though imperfectly, the scientific truths of the universe.

We are similarly able to use our reason to understand religious truths, which are different from scientific ones in that they are NOT provable by experiment, but can be proven by logic and plain common sense.

Take, for example, Mr. Duran himself. He would tell us that his mother gave birth to him. If one asked, “Prove it,” Mr. Duran could not by his own terms because he could not reproduce his own birth as an experiment.

We would have to trust that because he exists, he must have been born to a woman, and that his mother and those who witnessed his birth are trustworthy and believable.

The only way to have absolute, 100 percent certainty that Mrs. Duran was Mr. Duran’s mother would be to time travel and witness the fact itself.

But, as Mr. Duran knows, we rarely if ever have 100 percent certainty about anything yet are able to have sufficient trust in our provisional proofs and reason to consider somethings true even if we don’t have absolute proof.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a good example. If you want proof of the notion that he was God, you need only look at the facts.

First, his birth and life were foretold in prophecies preceding his birth by hundreds and thousands of years (please, if you will, find another religious figure in history whose coming was similarly foretold).

Second, his birth was supernatural in that Mary, his mother, was not impregnated by a man. Oh, you may choose to disregard the story of the Virgin Birth as mere piety, but we have the testimony of the Gospels and subsequent writings to attest to it.

You could believe these people were lying, just as you could believe people were lying about Mr. Duran’s mother, but the witnesses are unanimous.

Then, Jesus performed miracles during his earthly ministry. Making the blind see, the deaf hear, the dead rise to life. These were signs performed by Jesus expressly for people such as Mr. Duran, so that they would believe Jesus was divine.

Again, you may disbelieve the Gospels, but if you were present at that time and saw Jesus perform those miracles, wouldn’t you naturally conclude that 1) Jesus is able to operate outside of the normal bounds of natural science and 2) that if he is able to do so, then there must be some power above and beyond the natural world to which he is connected?

Finally, as a last proof of Jesus’ divine nature, he rose from the dead. Again, a pretty convincing factoid if there ever was one.

Mr. Duran would again dismiss the reliability of the witnesses and Gospel writers. But logic would require Mr. Duran to wonder why, if this were a lie, so many people would come to believe and die for that fact in a time when such beliefs were fervently oppressed by both Roman and Jewish authorities.

Two millennia and two billion believers later, the story of Jesus is still believed because people both trust those Gospel writers and believe through their own experiences what Jesus said was true.

Just as people who look at Mr. Duran’s mother and see the similarities in character and visage between her and her son, and therefore know that the stories of his birth are indeed true. Experience reinforces knowledge and leads us to truth.

But, in the end, nothing is absolutely certain. That’s where faith does indeed come in, and, alas, there’s no proof possible nor needed to support it.

Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.

login to post comments