Is the Bible Anti-Scientific?

In a debate between atheist Richard Dawkins and Christian mathematician John Lennox, held at Oxford University, Dawkins claimed that the fact that the Bible contains miracles makes the Bible "anti-scientific." Said Dawkins, "I don't think I could do science in world in which I thought that at any time a bit of magic would just show up and throw off all the data." 

In response, John Lennox pointed out that Dawkins' claim is illogical on the grounds that the only way in which you would be able to recognize a miracle is if it occurred within a well-balanced, ordered system that supported science. Without the regularity and order of all that make science possible, something out of the ordinary would never be noticed. A miracle necessitates an ordered system, and the claim of the miraculous first assumes an ordered, scientific system in order to claim that a departure form the normal has occurred. 

Lennox makes a brilliant argument and convincingly demonstrates that the prospect of miracles actually requires science to even be noticed as a miracle. There is also another side to this issue. There is a fundamental presupposition Dawkins is operating from that leads him, and many many others, to the conclusion that miracles discredit the Bible's veracity: anti-supernaturalism. 

Without drawing out a long explanation and definition of anti-supernaturalism (for that, there are a multitude of books on the topic, one of which, "The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict" by Josh McDowell, has a whole chapter on it), I'll cut to the chase. 

If you showed a friend a picture in a book of a zamboni machine and asked him what he thought, and he replied saying," Well that's preposterous! That can't be real." And if you then asked him why and his reply was "Well, because these sorts of machines don't exist!" you would think he was a little off. Yet this is precisely the presuppositional reasoning used by many people who deny the veracity of the biblical accounts of miracles. There are many critical scholars who deny the accounts of miracles or the resurrection on the basis of the fact that "People just don't rise from the dead." Rudolph Bultmann, one of founding scholars of biblical form criticism said that "an historical fact which involves a resurrection from the dead is uttelry inconceivable." Much of the language used by Bultmann and like scholars uses the phrase "the modern man," referring to the type of people who reject the supernatural elements of the Bible. The rhetoric gives the impression that science has disproven the supernatural. But such an assumption underminds the very definition of "supernatural." 

Pastor and author Tim Keller begins disarming the rejection of the supernatural by very simply saying, "If God exists then miracles have to be possible. Since science can't disprove God, then you have to at least be open to the possibility that miracles are possible." 

But on a more fundamental level, the rejection of the supernatural on scientific grounds is a logical fallacy. The skeptic approaches the subject having already drawn a conclusion before the investigation has begun. In terms of logic, the the major premise is the conclusion:

Premise A. Large, complex machines don't exist

Premise B. A photo of a large, complex machine exists

Conclusion. The photo must be a fraud

Or in terms of biblical supernaturalism: 

Premise A. The supernatural does not occur in real life. 

Premise B. The Bible reports supernatural events. 

Conclusion: The Bible must be a fraud. 

One problem I've noted among some of the more prominent atheists who are at the forefront of the so-called "New Atheism," people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins, is that they will take a philsophical (Hitchins) or scientific (Dawins) approach, while leaving the historical out of the question. One of the primary distinctives of Christianity, in comparison to almost all other religions, is (1) that its primary revelation, and method of revelation, is a person, and (2) the fact that the whole of Christian doctrine is rooted in an historical event, the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. 

Since most other religions are based, not on historical events, but on philosophical propositions, it seems the best defense for the Resurrection and the veracity of the New Testament should be historical. Whether it can be philosophically argued or not, if history confirms (or at least points toward a confirming consensus) the resurrection, then the resurrrection must be true regardless what science of philosophy says. No one philosophically argues the existence of the Roman Empire because there is sufficient historical evidence that the Roman Empire existed.  

Professor of philosophy and ethics at Liberty University and world-renowned expert on evidence for the Resurrection, Gary Habermas, presents a defense of the Resurrection based on historical facts which are accepted by nearly all critical scholars, many of whom are not believers. 

He begins by presenting some historiographical rules which all historians use to establish reliability of historical documents. He list rules such as the fact that the earlier a manuscript to its original composition the better; the earlier a document was written compared to when the events occured the better, that the higher number of manuscripts the better, etc., He goes to show two interesting conclusions: (1) that the entire life of Christ as the Bible presents it can be pieced together from extra-biblical writings from the first and early second centuries without ever using the Bible (he once gave a demonstration of this from 18 independent historical sources from the same time period or very soon after the close of the New Testament), and (2) that a solid case for the resurrection can be put together without ever using one of the four Gospels. 

Critical scholars, including skeptics and liberals, acknowledge most of the Pauline Epistles as genuinely written by Paul. Typically they will give Paul credit of authorship for 6-8 of them, and of these 6-8 are the big theological letters: Romans, Ephesians, Galatians, I and II Corinthians, etc. I don't have first-hand knowledge of the research Habermas has done, but as a guy who is recognized world-wide as an expert in this area and acknowledged as a good, honest scholar, I generally take his word on the research he's done when he says that virtually no scholar rejects Pauline authorship of these epistles. What's more, most of them recognize their early dating. I Corinthians, for example was written in the early 50's AD, and I Corinthians 3 which contains Paul's record of having received a primitive credal account of the death and resurrection of Jesus from the other Apostles, uses legal terminology for him having received some testimony of fact from them (at least the Greek terminology indicates as much). Another fact that most of these scholars will also acknowledge is that the date of Paul receiving this credal confession from the other Apostles is around 35 AD, virtually zero time gap between the resurrection and Paul's receipt of the confession not long after the time when he claims to have seen the resurrected Jesus himself. There is no other religious text that has this much historically confirmation. 

Habermas generally lists four facts which are almost universally accepted by modern scholarship: (1) Paul wrote I Corinthians 3, (2) Jesus was crucified and dead, (3) the tomb was empty, (4) Paul and the disciples believed to have seen the resurrected Jesus. 

Folowing a televised debate (viewable on Youtube) between Habermas and a leading philosophical atheist, Anthony Flew (who since has become a theist), Flew was asked if he could dispute the New Testament documents, to which he replied that he could not because New Testament was the best historical text in existence. (As a side note, one of the judges of the debate--he won the debate 4 to 5--afterward is quoted as saying that Habermas' arguments had convinced him that he should take the resurrection record more seriously.)

So the claim that the Bible cannot be true because the supernatural occurs in the Bible and supernatural events do not occur in real life, is only valid if it can be proven historically that supernatural events have never occurred (Obviously the view is more flawed than that because it begins with the assumption that God does not exist). But if a document which contains the record of supernatural events can be shown to be historically accurate, then logic must dictate that the resurrection is true. 

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