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Soapbox Philosophy: Resurrection? That’s impressive. But there’s one bigger miracle
by Gregory R. Norfleet · Op-Ed · March 27, 2024
That resurrection miracle we will celebrate on Easter? Impressive as it is, it’s not the biggest miracle.
The City of West Branch will host two Easter Egg hunts on Saturday. Area churches will celebrate the second-largest holiday on the Christian calendar on Sunday. All of these, directly or indirectly, center around how Jesus was crucified on the cross, died, and, as he predicted, rose from the dead three days later.
Pretty wild stuff, to be sure, especially the earthquake right when Jesus died (Matthew 27).
But the creation of the universe — Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” — gets the top prize in the miracle awards. Because if God can do that, then raising someone from the dead is child’s play.
We have around us, of course, a universe. And it is either infinitely old or has a finite age.
The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics tell us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed and that entropy constantly spreads heat to colder regions of matter. Science also tells us that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate.
This acceleration evidence runs counter to the theories related to a cyclical universe forever expanding and contracting. A cyclical, infinite universe would have also suffered from heat death by now; the universe is not a perpetual-motion machine.
So, we have a finite amount of energy increasingly diluted through expansion. That indicates a universe with a finite age, whether that age is 10,000 years old or 13.8 billion (Big Bang estimate) is not so important as the beginning itself.
What else have we learned about the universe? It has three major elements: Time, space, and matter. All three had to come into existence at the same time. Because if you have time and matter but no space, where would you put the matter? Or if you have space and matter but no time, when did you put the matter there?
And since matter cannot create itself, and neither can time create time nor space create space, then whatever or whoever created the universe had to be timeless (eternal), spaceless, and immaterial.
The universe is also incredibly complex (consider ecosystems, solar systems, the structure of the brain, etc.), incredibly powerful (gravity, natural disasters, the energy in a single star, etc.), and contains things natural processes cannot explain (how life came from non-life, the creation of consciousness, the laws of nature, etc.). So, the creator is immensely intelligent and powerful and operates outside of nature yet upon nature.
We can also conclude that the creator is a being. To create something requires a choice, and we have no examples of inanimate objects making choices.
Even though I started this column talking about miracles and Christ’s resurrection, nothing in the above explanation of the origin of the universe — my take on the Kalam cosmological argument — quotes anything from the Bible. It’s just a few scientific discoveries mixed in with reason and logic. (Just as a fun bit of trivia, science cannot prove the existence of reason and logic, even though it presupposes their existence to carry out the scientific method.)
That all said, do we know of any being that is timeless, spaceless, immaterial, intelligent, and immensely powerful? To answer that requires that we leave the realm of what science can answer and reach some conclusions based on the evidence.
There are many religions, though only some try to explain the origin of the universe. Of those, the Christian Bible is the only one that describes God with the aforementioned qualities.
So, to the local Quakers and the Methodists and the Catholics and the Lutherans — plus the smattering of Baptists and non-denominational Christians who travel outside of town on Sundays — don’t interpret this column to make light of the resurrection. By all means, it’s certainly infinitely more noteworthy than anything mankind has ever achieved, not to mention awe-inspiring and humbling.
God created us with free will. We screwed things up. And Jesus fixed it. And we should be nothing but grateful for Him cleaning up and offering to save us from our mess. The personal benefits available to us — if we should humbly and sincerely ask — are the greatest gift we could ever hope to receive.
Enjoy Easter Sunday wherever you may worship and know that miracle was only possible after the first miracle.
Gregory R. Norfleet is the editor of the West Branch Times. You may reach him at gregory.norfleet@westbranchtimes.com or 319-643-2131.
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