The Case for a Creator (45 page)

“One more thing. The existence of my soul gives me a new way to understand how God can be everywhere. That’s because my soul occupies my body without being located in any one part of it. There’s no place in my body where you can say, ‘Here I am.’ My soul is not in the left part of my brain, it’s not in my nose, it’s not in my lungs. My soul is fully present everywhere throughout my body. That’s why if I lose part of my body, I don’t lose part of my soul.

“In a similar way, God is fully present everywhere. He isn’t located, say, right outside the planet Mars. God occupies space in the same way the soul occupies the body. If space were somehow cut in half, God wouldn‘t lose half his being. So now I have a new model, based on my own self, for God’s omnipresence. And shouldn’t we expect this? If we were made in the image of God, wouldn’t we expect there to be some parallels between us and God?”

I asked, “Do you foresee more scientists coming to the conclusion that the soul, though immaterial, is very real?”

“The answer is yes—if they are willing to open themselves up to nonscientific knowledge,” he replied. “I believe in science; it’s wonderful and gives us some very important information. But there are other ways of knowing things as well. Because, remember, most of the evidence for the reality of consciousness and the soul is from our own first-person awareness of ourselves and has nothing to do with the study of the brain. The study of the brain allows us to correlate the brain with conscious states, but it tells us nothing about what consciousness itself is.”

“But, J. P., aren’t you asking scientists to do the unthinkable—to ignore scientific knowledge?”

“No, not at all,” he insisted. “I’m only asking that they become willing to listen to
all
the evidence and see where it leads—which is what the quest for truth should be about.”

“And if they do that?”

“They will come to believe in the reality of the soul and the immaterial nature of consciousness. And this could open them up personally to something even more important—to a much larger Mind and a much bigger Consciousness, who in the beginning was the Logos, and who made us in his image.”

COGITO ERGO SUM

A ringing telephone ended our conversation, although I was wrapping up the interview anyway. A colleague was calling to remind Moreland of a faculty meeting. I thanked Moreland for his time and insights, gathered my things, and strolled out to my car. I was just about to start the engine, but instead I let go of the key, leaned back in my seat, and took a few moments (as Moreland would say) to introspect.

Interestingly, this very act of introspection intuitively affirmed to me what Moreland’s facts and logic had already established—my ability to ponder, to reason, to speculate, to imagine, and to feel the emotional brunt of the interview showed that my mind surely could not have been the evolutionary byproduct of brute, mindless matter.

“Selfhood . . . is not explicable in material or physical terms,” said philosopher Stuart C. Hackett. “The essential spiritual selfhood of man has its only adequate ground in the transcendent spiritual Selfhood of God as Absolute Mind.”
⁵⁹

In other words, I am more than just the sum total of a physical brain and body parts. Rather, I
am
a soul, and I
have
a body. I think—therefore, I am. Or as Hackett said: “With modest apology to Descartes:
Cogito, ergo Deus est!
I think, therefore God is.”
⁶⁰

I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with philosopher Robert Augros and physicist George Stanciu, who explored the depths of the mind/body controversy and concluded that “physics, neuroscience, and humanistic psychology all converge on the same principle: mind is not reducible to matter.” They added: “The vain expectation that matter might someday account for mind . . . is like the alchemist’s dream of producing gold from lead.
⁶¹

I leaned forward and started the car. After months of investigating scientific evidence for God—traveling a total of 26,884 miles, which is the equivalent of making one lap around the Earth at the equator—I had finally reached a critical mass of information. It was time to synthesize and digest what I had learned—and ultimately to come to a conclusion that would have vast and life-changing implications.

For Further Evidence

More Resources on This Topic

Cooper, John W.
Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting
. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989.

Habermas, Gary and J. P. Moreland.
Beyond Death
. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1998.

Moreland, J. P. “God and the Argument from Mind.” In
Scaling the Secular City
. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1987.

——.
What Is the Soul?
Norcross, Ga.: Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, 2002.

——. and Scott B. Rae.
Body and Soul
. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000.

Taliaferro, Charles.
Consciousness and the Mind of God
. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Witham, Larry. “Mind and Brain.” In
By Design: Science and the Search for God
. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003.

11
THE CUMULATIVE CASE FOR A CREATOR

The vast mysteries of the universe should only confirm our belief in the certainty of its Creator. I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science.

Werner von Braun, the father of space science
¹

Faith does not imply a closed, but an open mind. Quite the opposite of blindness, faith appreciates the vast spiritual realities that materialists overlook by getting trapped in the purely physical.

Sir John Templeton
²

S
tanding boldly in front of the national media, his posture like a boxer ready to pounce, the cocky prosecutor shook his finger at five television cameras and taunted renowned defense attorney William F. Neal.

“I defy Mr. Neal,” he declared,
“to stop that Pinto!”
His words became a rally cry, challenging Neal to establish that a Ford Pinto containing three teenage girls had come to a halt on an Indiana highway before being struck from behind by a Chevy van.

It was yet another moment of high drama in a ground-breaking criminal trial that had captivated the nation. In the first case of its kind in U.S. history, prosecutors blamed the girls’ deaths on the car’s manufacturer, charging Ford Motor Company with reckless homicide for allegedly designing a vehicle that was prone to explode in low- to moderate-speed rear crashes.

If the Pinto had been safe, the prosecutors contended, the three teenagers would have walked away virtually unscathed from the relatively minor collision. But, they said, because the car’s gas tank had been located in a vulnerable position, the car erupted in a fireball that consumed them all.

A pivotal issue was the severity of the crash. Neal maintained that the Pinto had been stopped on the highway and the van was traveling at fifty miles an hour. “No subcompact could have withstood the assault of the van in this case,” Neal told the jurors.

The prosecutor, however, countered that the Pinto had been moving in the same direction as the van, which meant the force of the impact would have been much less. Indeed, a few eyewitnesses testified the car had been in motion, though their accounts varied and during cross-examination Neal sought to raise doubts about the vantage points from which they saw the Pinto.

Then the prosecutor presented his star witness: the shaggy-haired, twenty-one-year-old driver of the van, who had not been criminally charged for the crash and was cooperating with the prosecution. He testified that the Pinto had been moving at fifteen to twenty miles an hour when they collided. Neal scoffed, pointing out that the distracted driver had only seen the Pinto for one-sixth of a second before hitting it. But the driver, who had five previous traffic convictions in three years, stuck to his story.

In the glare of the television cameras, the prosecutor was ebullient. Feeling confident in the thoroughness of his investigation and believing Neal could offer no contradictory testimony, he defiantly challenged Neal to make good on his promise that he would stop the Pinto.

Surprisingly, however, the prosecutor’s bravado was short-lived. A few days later, to the astonishment of the prosecution, Neal used both negative and positive evidence to accomplish what the prosecutor was convinced he could never do.

First, Neal undermined the testimony of the van’s driver. The physician who had treated him for minor injuries said the driver had admitted to him that the Pinto had been stopped. That was damaging enough for the prosecution.

Even more devastating, Neal then presented two surprise witnesses that police had somehow overlooked during their supposedly exhaustive investigation. Both were hospital workers who testified that the driver of the Pinto told them independently before her death that she had been stopped on U.S. Highway 133 when the van struck her car.

The prosecutor was stunned. In a flash, these two unforeseen witnesses changed the entire momentum of the trial. “Nobody knew anything about them,” the prosecutor sputtered. “They came out of the blue.”

Outside the courtroom, Neal was ecstatic. “The prosecutor challenged us to stop that Pinto,” he said, stifling a chuckle. “Well, now we’ve stopped it
twice
.”

The once-confident prosecutor, now publicly embarrassed, found himself on the defensive as reporters pelted him with questions about why his investigation had failed to unearth these witnesses. Ultimately, after several judicial rulings further eroded the prosecutor’s case, jurors voted to acquit the automaker.

Neal’s performance, which I documented in my book
Reckless Homicide
, was among the most masterful I had ever seen in my years as a legal affairs journalist.
³
His success was not the product of adroit legal maneuvering, clever arguments, or courtroom slight-of-hand. Plain and simple, it was old-fashioned, dogged detective work that uncovered the surprise witnesses. Defense investigators went beyond the obvious, posed questions that others weren’t asking, out-hustled police investigators, and followed the clues wherever they led.

Years later, I would understand exactly how the prosecutor felt that day. I was once full of confidence that Darwinism justified my atheism. I felt I had investigated the issue sufficiently, having studied biology, chemistry, geology, anthropology, and other sciences in school and having read books that reenforced my beliefs. No doubt about it—natural selection acting on random variation had put God out of a job.

When Christians approached me about the evidence for their faith, I was as defiant as the combative prosecutor on the courthouse steps.
The Origin of Species
trumped the Bible. The critical thinking of scientists overpowered the wishful thinking of theists. To me, the case was closed.

But then, prompted by the positive changes in my wife after she became a follower of Jesus, I began to go beyond the obvious, to set aside my prejudices, to ask questions I had never posed before, and to pursue the clues of science and history wherever they led. Instead of letting naturalism limit my search, I opened myself to the full range of possibilities. And, frankly, I wasn’t prepared for what would happen.

Like the negative evidence that undermined the van’s driver in the Pinto case, the facts of science systematically eroded the foundation of Darwinism until it could no longer support the weight of my atheistic conclusions. Suddenly, the intellectual basis for my skepticism was collapsing.

That was disconcerting enough. But then—like the surprise witnesses who suddenly shifted the momentum at the Indiana trial—my wide-ranging research was building an unexpected affirmative case for the existence of a Creator.

Yes, I was stunned; yes, I felt like the wind was being knocked out of me; yes, it was unnerving to wrestle with the implications. But I had vowed to follow the facts regardless of the cost—even at the cost of my own smug self-sufficiency.

A FRESH EXAMINATION OF THE EVIDENCE

I was reminded of the Pinto trial as I sat in my home office and glanced over at a shelf where my eye caught the book I had written on the case. As I started reminiscing about the unanticipated turnaround in that courtroom drama, my thoughts drifted to the emotions I felt on November 8, 1981.

It was on that day, after nearly two years of intensive research, that I sat alone in my room and wrote down the key evidence I had discovered during my original investigation into the credibility of Christianity. Much of it concerned the facts regarding the life, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, as I described in my book
The Case for Christ
, and the answers to the “Big Eight” objections to Christianity, as I recounted in
The Case for Faith
.

But also very important at the time were the corroborating scientific facts. Even though there was less evidence than is readily available today, there was still plenty upon which to reach a verdict. I can remember analyzing the scientific research and coming to the startling conclusion that the data of the physical world point powerfully toward the existence of a Creator.