John Lennox Brilliant Response to Atheist Philosopher on the Evidence for Christianity

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]is the historical record. Are the gospels we read today authentic copies of the original gospels? And uh you're right, I'm citing people like Bartman and Richard Carrier. So let's just forget about that if you don't like those authorities. It's not that I don't like them. I read them. What concerns me is if you're putting an argument, you've got to take the opposition's best evidence. And I was surprised that that was absent. That's all I read. Urban and I read um well, not so much Carrier because he's written off by most scholars completely.

[00:00:37]>> Welcome aboard. Here's John Lennox debating atheist Larry Shapiro on whether Christianity is grounded in historical evidence or merely superstition. Shapiro argues that the gospel writers cannot be trusted in their accounts of the supernatural resurrection of Jesus. In this video, Dr. Lennox responds with thoughtful and logical arguments, defending the historical credibility of miracles and the resurrection accounts. When you're looking for justification for different beliefs, there there are different ways you can go about finding justification.

[00:01:05]I was interested in trying to understand why it is Christians believe in the resurrection. It always struck me as it's got to be crazy, right? Here you have this guy who reportedly dies and is put into a a tomb and three days later he's he's out walking around again.

[00:01:28]That's really unusual.

[00:01:31]Typical ways of justifying beliefs don't don't allow you to justify that. One way to justify a belief is just through inductive evidence. If you had seen lots of people dying and coming back 3 days later, then you could be justified in believing that that Jesus was resurrected. We need some other way to figure out whether he was resurrected.

[00:01:52]One thing you have to do when you think about what would make this a miracle is to find a miracle. And as I understand a miracle, it's a violation of a law of nature, which coming back from the dead is. And it's a violation of the law of a law of nature in virtue of some kind of divine intervention. That's that's what makes it a miracle, I think. So then you ask, well, what justifies my belief that Jesus did come back from the dead and his reason or the cause of his returning from the dead was a divine intervention?

[00:02:21]And when you look at the evidence, it's really slim. It's based on gospel accounts written by unknown authors decades after the event occurred. And it's written by people well it was reported to these authors who lived in different places and spoke different languages by a very superstitious group of people. These were people who who thought demons possessed each other.

[00:02:47]These were people who thought that uh I I once looked up I bought a book what did these people believe and all sorts of stuff that today no four-year-old would believe. So this is the the evidence and it just doesn't suffice to warrant belief in something so incredibly unlikely. Well, first of all, just thinking of what Larry says, I do not believe that miracles are violations of the laws of nature. I think that Hume was wrong. And his major interpreter, Anthony Flu, before he died, told me he was wrong. You see, that's where the problem starts. We have this idea that there's a law like the law of the land, you know, and I see these notices in car parks here, violators will be towed. Now, we don't have notices like that, but to cut a long story short, I find CS Lewis's analogy very helpful. I'm staying in a lovely hotel here, and um the night before last, I put $1,000 in the drawer.

[00:03:52]And then last night, I put $2,000 in the drawer. One and one makes two. Three. So the 3,000. But I woke up this morning and I found $500 in the drawer. Now what has been broken? The laws of arithmetic or the laws of Wisconsin state.

[00:04:10]Now think about it. It's the laws of the state have been broken because the laws of arithmetic have not been broken.

[00:04:19]And that's where the confusion lies in this whole thing. You see, in order to recognize a miracle, it's not a violation of laws. It's an apparent exception to perceived regularities which have been set in the universe by the creator. If they weren't there, you wouldn't be able to recognize any miracle. Because if you didn't know that the norm was that dead people stay dead, you wouldn't um think anything of someone popping up from the dead. So, you need two things. You need regularities. And where I think Larry and I differ profoundly is those regularities which we encapsulate in the laws of science are not laws in the sense that they constrain anything. They're simply as Vitkinstein said, they are descriptions of what normally happens. Now God who is the creator, he can feed a new event into the system and the laws take over.

[00:05:19]What I mean by that is this. If I were claiming that Jesus rose from the dead by natural processes, of course, it would be violating laws of nature, but I'm claiming no such thing. I'm claiming that he rose from the dead. He was raised from the dead by the power of God. So, I I simply do not recognize that description of laws. The second point is this. I was puzzled by your book, I must say, Larry, because and you quoted it just now, these records, which are very slim, written decades after the events, but in your book, you quote with approval evidence of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. And I checked out your authorities, and they're 200 years after the actual date. So, if you accept 200, what are a few decades? But what bothered me more than anything was that having started by saying we need to check the best evidence, your two major sources are Bartman and Richard Carrier.

[00:06:26]Now they are the absolute extreme.

[00:06:30]Carrier against all practically all distinguished ancient historians even denies the existence of Jesus. And oddly enough, Bartman doesn't hold your view on the scantiness of the evidence. He says that um we can reconstruct the majority of the New Testament, although probably and I'm quoting not 100% accuracy. Scholars are convinced Urban says we can reconstruct the original words of the New Testament. the historical evidence for the authenticity of the hu of the New Testament in particular is vastly better than the historical evidence for all classical works that are known. So I don't recognize this slimness. The next point was superstition in the ancient world. Yes, it existed as it exists today. But Luke opens his gospel dealing as a medical scientist with this problem because he tells the story of a priest who's praying and an angel says, "You're going to have a child." The priest is very old. He says, "Don't be ridiculous.

[00:07:36]I'm far too old." He wasn't a superstitious chap that believed every story. He knew exactly as clearly as a modern gynecologist that you get, mercifully, I nearly said, you get too old to have children. And he rejected it. And it's very interesting that Luke starts his gospel by raising this question of our antipathy towards the miraculous. Now I certainly find B theorem very helpful. And of course B theorem makes the point that if you've got a very improbable thing if you bring background information in that background information can help either increase or decrease the probability.

[00:08:17]Now you see when it comes to the resurrection it is by definition highly improbable. How do we get at it? We don't get at it by induction because by definition it's unique in history. So you have to come at it by abduction inference to the best explanation. And I spent most of my life thinking about this starting off at Cambridge when I heard one of the world's top lawyers making a forensic investigation of the historical evidence for the resurrection. It's cumulative. It's not absolute proof. But as I look at it again and again, it seems to me that ever increasingly that this is based on absolutely solid evidence. Now, it's a big deal. And what's at stake I would like to bring in very briefly um is this that if Jesus is raised from the dead there's another way of proving or establishing rather that the resurrection happened and that is it's logical if he's raised from the dead that he can be encountered.

[00:09:25]Now, I've lived long enough to see many people's lives transformed.

[00:09:30]Transformed from narcotic dependence to peace and a meaningful life and happiness, food on the table where there was none before. Despair turning into joy. I've seen that again and again, particularly among students. And when you ask them, "What has happened to you?" They say something like, "I met Christ. I met the risen Christ. I became a Christian." Whatever way they put it, you end up by adding two and two and making four. So I believe there is an inductive method of establishing it and that is making the experiment that Jesus himself suggested that if we trust him, he will give us peace with God, forgiveness and so on. And when you've experienced that, that is a very strong piece of experiential evidence that it is true. So I'm sorry that I have to say I find the evidence that I read in your book very convincing of the truth of my con Christian position.

[00:10:35]While skeptics such as Bart Airman raise important questions regarding textual variance and manuscript transmission, many textual scholars maintain that the original wording of the New Testament can still be reconstructed with a high degree of confidence because of the vast manuscript evidence available today.

[00:10:49]Even himself acknowledges the extraordinary abundance of New Testament manuscripts and affirms that no central Christian doctrine is fundamentally undermined by these textual variations.

[00:11:00]Ultimately, the case for the resurrection is argued not only on historical grounds, but also through the enduring testimony of millions of believers throughout history. Christians believe that encounters with the risen Christ have transformed lives, shaped civilizations, and inspired profound moral and spiritual change across generations. Thanks for watching. God bless you.