Here’s a report from a fantastic week on campus at Leeds University: It was deeply moving to see 45 students turn up every morning at 8.00am to pray every day. To give you a flavour of what the week was like, here are some of the questions that I answered publicly in the Q&A after the talks I gave:
Questions relating to the scientific quest for a past eternal universe to escape the theistic implications of the universe having a beginning moment where space, time, energy and matter all came into existence at the same time:
“What about a bounced universe?” “What about Big Bang, Big Crunch, Big Bounce?” “What about an oscillating universe? A universe oscillating between contraction and expansion?” “Isn’t the case for God, ultimately probabilistic? In other words, you have a series of highly unlikely phenomena (i.e. the existence of the universe, the existence of organic life) and so you present ‘God’ as the most probable answer. Can we be any more definite than that?” “Who made God?”
Questions about the reliability of the Bible:
“You’ve made a case for the reliable transmission of the New Testament documents, but why are there so many translations? How do we know if the translations can be trusted?” “What assurances can you give us on reliable oral transmission before the gospels were written?” “Do you believe in ‘Q’? Surely ‘Q’ is earlier than Mark’s gospel, so we don’t really know much about the earliest pre-gospel source?” “We all know that some books got left out of the Bible. This was just an arbitrary decision make post Constantine in 325AD. So what about the Gnostic Gospels? And what about the Apocrapha?”
Questions about whether Jesus was really just a great moral teacher:
“In a recent poll, Jesus was voted only the third most influential person who has ever lived, so doesn’t that undermine your case for his pre-eminence?” “Jesus being God is illogical. How could an infinite being (like God) limit himself to being a finite human being? This is a logical contradiction. In every other area of life I am encouraged to be logical, so why should I accept an illogical idea about something as important as God?” “Could Jesus have just been mistaken?” “What about Bart Ehrman? He’s a top textual critic and he’s written a book called ‘Misquoting Jesus’. What about his claim that the New Testament has 1000s of textual variants within it?” “What if someone else was crucified who looked like Jesus, and the real Jesus was not crucified?”
Questions about the alleged resurrection of Jesus:
“The differences between the resurrection accounts in the gospels undermine the reliability of the message. Therefore it is surely inferior to the Holy Qur’an, which is without any internal contradictions” “Where was this appearance to 500 people referred to by Paul in 1 Corinthians?” “What about this bizarre reference to the graves of many holy people being opened and a mass resurrection in Jerusalem at the time when Jesus died. If this really happened, surely we’d have more than one source for it.” “What about the fact that Moslems are willing to die for their faith? Surely that undermines the force of the fact that the early Christians were willing to suffer martyrdom?”
Questions relating to how a good God could allow suffering?
“Would it not be insulting to go up to a starving child in Africa and tell them that it’s OK that they are suffering because one day they’ll be in heaven, or because a guru suffered 2,000 years ago, and because God may have some mysterious purpose in their suffering that they don’t know about yet?” “How can suffering in hell be justified?” “Surely Jesus suffering was for only a few days? How can that in any way be understood to balance out the suffering of millions of people for thousands of years?” “Why didn’t God create a perfect world in the first place? Especially if he knew that there would be suffering on earth?” “Why doesn’t God tell people to move away from the fault lines of tectonic plates where earthquakes are most likely to happen?” “Surely God’s greatest goal should be to maximize the happiness of the greatest number of people?”
So as you can imagine there were some who still have deep reservations, but there were also lots of people who having found out more, came closer to Christ, and several others who trusted Him for the first time. There were 16 students who said they were not part of any church or of the Christian Union who said “yes to Christ/Count me in” during the week.