How do you go about 'proving' something ... or for that matter someone?
- My wife puts bread dough in a warm place covered with a clean cloth until it has 'risen' and been 'proved'.
- A young bull or a boar at a testing station gets a trial run to be 'proved'.
- A new race vehicle, or engineering design, or any kind of concept goes through proving trials and accreditation processes.
When they are proven they need to go on and get approved, because the process of approval has to be accurate too. And when the proven product has gone through the approved testing process THEN it can be approved, because it has been proven there are tangible things that SHOW this is the real deal.
Enter the Royal Society
So when the Royal Society published a 'research' article yesterday ( Zmigrod Leor, Eisenberg Ian W., Bissett Patrick G., Robbins Trevor W. and Poldrack Russell A. 2021The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approachPhil. Trans. R. Soc. B37620200424 ) examining what sort of things induce a person to find religious faith, I was really interested.
So what DOES lead a person to believe?
What the research article said was that religious belief arises in people who demonstrate a number of features:
"greater caution on speeded tasks, and reduced strategic information processing and social risk-taking, but in contrast to dogmatism and political conservatism, religiosity was associated with greater agreeableness and risk perception."
To put that in English they are saying people of faith tend to be a bit twp but quite friendly.
There's more:
They suggest that "... (sic.) impaired accumulation of evidence from the decision environment—may result in the dogmatic tendency to discard evidence prematurely and to resist belief updating in light of new information."
Because 'religious' people are stupid, they say, they are not ready to learn and change their minds.
There's even more.
They suggest that:
"The psychological signature of religiosity consisted of heightened caution and reduced strategic information processing in the cognitive domain (similarly to conservatism), and enhanced agreeableness, risk perception and aversion to social risk-taking, in the personality domain (figure 4 and electronic supplementary material, figure S6).
The finding that religious participants exhibited elevated caution and risk perception is particularly informative to researchers investigating the theory that threat, risk and disgust sensitivity are linked to moral and religious convictions [92–97], and that these cognitive and emotional biases may have played a role in the cultural origins of large-scale organized religions [98,99]."
So, to summarise, the suggestion is that believers are believers because they are stupid, stubborn and scared.
Stupid, stubborn and scaredy cats
Let's take a look at the evidence for that.
On the Day of Pentecost, about six weeks after He was tortured publicly to death by the Roman authorities (who were out in force at the time and place in question) a set of undeniably prophecy-fulfilling phenomena broke out at Jerusalem amongst the followers of a religious teacher called Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus of Nazareth had spent the last three years wandering around healing the sick, raising the dead, stilling storms at sea and releasing the deranged from their afflictions ... as was testified by His followers and as described also by those who were NOT His followers.
And then ... just a few miles from the Nazarene's place of execution and in the very city where He was condemned, in response to the unique phenomena that had just broken out, up stood Peter in front of a potentially immensely hostile crowd to speak about the change of mind he'd had about Jesus and to call on the crowds to have that change of mind too.
And Peter was saying this in front of huge crowds and in the presence of the learned and the authorities that killed Jesus.
That knocks the 'scaredy-cat' and 'slow to change' ideas of that research on the head ... as does 2,000 years of subsequent church history, with a far bigger sample of people to study than was investigated in the Royal Society article!
So WHAT is going on in this sermon?
The accreditation of faith in Jesus of Nazareth
In his short sermon addressed to people of all sorts from all over the known world who had gathered at Jerusalem and were currently experiencing the phenomenon which meant that they could all hear what was being said in their own language ... with THEM, Peter appealed to three sources of accreditation of Jesus:
- He appealed to the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy:
"this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
‘“In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people."
Acts 2:16-17
- He appealed to their knowledge of what Jesus had done:
" ‘Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know."Acts 2:22
- And He appealed to the concrete evidence of the empty tomb a couple of miles away on the opposite hill
"you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him"
Acts 2:23-24
Three thousand men believed that day.
Five thousand the next.
Many of them priests and rabbis and the brightest men of their day, along with every shade of personality type, intellectual background and culture in Jerusalem in those days.
And that is the pattern that has been perpetuated through history.
All manner of people have looked at the evidence for Jesus, seen that His fulfilment of prophecy, His direct intervention in life and his historical resurrection from the dead show Him to be the One accredited by God ... and they have then gone on to live and often die as a result because they continued to experience and believe it.
The Point
However clever people sound in their arguments and in their attempt to dismiss faith in Jesus, they really have got a problem succeeding in their efforts! As Peter said:
"Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know."
Jesus was accredited by God then, in the eyes of the eyewitnesses of His life, death and resurrection; and that same Jesus is accredited by God in the experience of 2,000 years of the history and experience of the diverse people who are the Church.
The Takeaway
It is very possible to be amazingly cleverly-sounding wrong.
For an hypothesis to be true it must be proven: 'does it work'?
For 2,000 years the Jesus hypothesis has been tested across a very wide sample of humanity.
It's not just for twpsins, stubborn folks and scaredy-cats!
It holds water ... and bringing that water brings life.
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