#STRask - Can You Provide Verifiable, Non-Religious Evidence That a Supernatural Jesus Existed?

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Question about providing verifiable, non-religious evidence that a supernatural Jesus existed.   I am an atheist and militantly anti-god-belief. However, I do have an open mind, so could you please provide verifiable, non-religious evidence that a supernatural Jesus actually existed?

This is Stan To Reasons, hashtag STRASK podcast. I almost said starring Greg Kokel, and I know you would hate that, so I'm not going to say that with Greg Kokel and Amy Hall. Thank you. And this first question comes from Kagan. In the interest of being honest and transparent, I'm an atheist and militantly anti-God belief. However, I do have an open mind. So could you please provide verifiable, non-religious evidence that a supernatural Jesus actually existed? Thanks, and be safe.

All right. So here's a guy. He's a militant atheist with an open mind. I'm already a little bit skeptical. And then he says, give me evidence. And then he qualifies the kind of evidence that would be acceptable to him. And with his qualification, he is, and I don't have to go overall of right now, but I'm just giving you a general remark. He is trying to disqualify legitimate kinds of evidence that might make the point because he's going to just dismiss that as religious, which he doesn't believe in.

Of course, the very point of providing evidence is to challenge the idea of whether or not there are religious, whatever that word actually means. That would need some clarification if we were in conference conversation. No, I lost my train of thought. Something about the word religious, that the whole idea is trying to find out whether there is good evidence for something religious. which he's kind of dismissing as any evidence. And so it doesn't sound like he's open-minded. Let me see. I'm open.

I don't believe in the Holocaust. I don't believe in all those Jews dying. But I'd be open to it. I'm militantly against the idea. But I'm open to it as long as you give me evidence that has nothing to do with anyone that was involved in the Holocaust. Now, of course, that might be possible to provide some other. But notice how unfairly and inappropriately, a person like that has limited the kinds of things

that would legitimately give evidence for the Holocaust. The fact is, the best people to give evidence about what happened during the Holocaust is not the Germans who are trying to deny it. They have a motivation to deny. In fact, they did that. they tried to destroy all evidence as they're losing the war, but rather the people who experienced it. Oh, well, they have a bias. What do you mean they have a bias?

Yeah, they have a stake in the matter. Of course they have a stake in the matter. That's why they're good witnesses to the event, because not all biases distort, and this is somewhat what is assumed with questions that are qualified in this way. not all biases distort. Some biases are in place simply because the person is a good source of information, which is why they have a point of view about the thing they're being questioned on. So this is all starting out of the wrong foot. But let's just go back and see what we can do to provide an answer to the question as put.

Could you read it again, Amy? Could you please provide verifiable non-religious evidence that a supernatural Jesus actually existed. Okay, non-religious. Okay. Evidence. I'm writing these words down. Did you get verified?

Yeah, you got verifiable. Yeah, natural. Okay, so now here's the word. What do you mean by verifiable? That's got to be, that's like asking proof. Well, what do you mean by proof? Well, God would have to stand in front of me and, you know, and say the Greek alphabet backwards or something like that would be proof.

Well, that was nobody requires something like that to believe anything, even something really, really important. So the demand here is way excessive of the circumstances. I don't know what he means by verifiable, especially if he's a committed atheist, all right. By the way, the notion of proof presumes a rational process or even verifiable evidence presumes a rational process that you go through to come to conclusions. Well, if atheistic materialism is true, and that's most atheists, so I'm just presuming in this case, then all you have is domino's falling in the universe. You have a deterministic universe and with rationality is not even possible. And the irony is that Sam Harris believes this. He's one of the so-called new atheists, one of the two remaining that are still

alive. And this is his view that we're all, it's consistent with his materialism, but he doesn't realize that determinism destroys rationality. Because rationality requires that we make choices between options based on evidence that we see justifies conclusions. And if we're just determined to believe what we believe, it has nothing to do with any evidence at all. There's no rationality in process. You can't do reason in a deterministic universe. I'm just taking a step back. He's asking for something, verifiable, non-religious evidence, that actually doesn't even make sense in his worldview. Well, it's worse than that.

There's no personhood. There's no, there's no you. There's no consciousness. It's just materialism. Anyway, go on. Just a wet machine, basically. Yeah. Okay.

All right. So then I'm trying to think. And then non-religious evidence. If I can't get a clear, reasonable, even-handed definition of verifiable and non-religious. then I can't answer this question because what he's done is he's built his success regarding this issue into the way he's asked the question. He has framed it in a very particular way, just like I attempted to do a few moments ago. With the Holocaust, people can see, oh, that's what's going on. I think the same kind of thing is going on here.

So, what, historically verifiable? When I think of the – regarding the resurrection, I think of the minimal case, minimal facts approach, which I use in a story of reality and in my own talks on this. The fact that virtually every historian, secular or not, critical or not, Christian or not, acknowledges that Jesus was a man of history because the evidence is so good that Jesus died in a Roman Christian. cross that he was buried in a tomb, which was empty a few days later. And his disciples said they saw him as the resurrected Christ and then gave their lives for that testimony. Now, that's evidence. And that's verifiable if what you mean is what is the best explanation for an infinite inference to the best explanation. That would be a type of proof, so to speak. I have put quotes around it, because it kind of depends on what you mean by that word. But we do

this all the time. And this is the way science works, by the way. It looks at all of these particular facts, which are just there. And then it tries to assemble a way of understanding how those facts relate to each other. And they come up with different explanations. The one has the most explanatory power is the one they think is true. It verifies it. And the more they work on this, the more they can verify it. And so that what I just offered, the minimal facts approach, it turns out that the best explanation for those facts,

and you also got the skeptic James, Jesus half-brother, and you have the persecutor of Christians, Saul of Tarsus, each changing their mind, turning on a dime, because they said they saw the resurrected Christ. So how do you explain that? That's not religious. Not a single one of those details has any religious content, unless you want to say they said they saw Jesus. Oh, that's religious. But now that your definitions are totally self-serving, they are meant to disqualify any bona fide evidence.

Okay. No, to see a man after he had been dead is just, it's a claim, and we have to ask, are they telling his truth? That's it. Now, it does have religious ramifications, spiritual ramifications, but what's wrong with that? Now, I think that those are the kinds of things you could go to. Now, how about this? In the Torah, not the Torah, the Talmud, when it speaks of Jesus, it says that Jesus was executed because he was a sorcerer.

Why would I say that? That's the Jews' assessment of Jesus, and they didn't believe that he was who he claimed to be. They're not friendly, but they are identifying something that they know about Jesus, a sorcerer is somebody who works in the supernatural. So that's an explicit reference to his miracle working power. Now, those are religious Jews, so that's religious, so you can't count that.

Well, wait a minute, they're not religious in the sense that the Christians were religious. They didn't have religious convictions that were based on a supernatural Jesus. Rather, these are enemies that acknowledge this detail of Jesus' life. So, does that count? You have historians that have recorded Tacitus and Pliny and others recorded things that were, they're secularists, and they didn't, not only did not believe in Christianity, they hated Christians in many cases. You can see this from the content of what they wrote. And that's not a supernatural source, but they acknowledge that the accounts about Jesus related to supernatural things. So the testimony of the New Testament, New Gospels in particular, and the testimony of the secular historians is the same. Now, they're not saying Jesus did rise from the dead. They're saying this is what the Christians believe, but there's a point of verification there.

So the big problem here, I'm interested here which you have to say, Amos, but the big problem here is the way this has been, the question's been laid out. it's almost like tell me verifiable facts about the life of Jesus that nobody who ever knew Jesus and believed in him had to say it's like it's like write an autobiography and write a biography of Greg Cole but you can't talk to anybody who knew him because they believed he existed after all so you can't talk to them this is what's going on this is the hard thing if somebody has evidence that Jesus was supernatural and they were convinced of that, then they started to follow Jesus. So then their testimony is invalid according to him. So I think asking about what he means by non-religious evidence, I think, is key here. Because if any evidence points to the supernatural Jesus, is he just going to dismiss that as religious? There's just no way to answer that. But I like all the examples you gave Greg. And also, there's a book by Gary Habermas called Evidence for the historical Jesus. So that might be someplace to go. That's by Habermas. Gary Habermass, I think there's another book by that same name. But that's great. He has all

sorts of non-biblical evidence. If that's what... If you want historians, there are 17 sources outside of the biblical record that make mention of Jesus and give information of what they understand about the Jesus of history. But the idea that they were saying Jesus was a sorcerer, I think, is a huge deal because you have people who are acknowledging something supernatural was going on, even though they reject all these, the explanation for it. I think that's a good one. And then, of course, you can always look at the testimony itself of the gospel writers of the people who are giving evidence. Are they making it up? Did it happen in the time of when they were claiming to write? Were they familiar with things? Did they get the geography right? Were the names in the actual percentage that names were at that time in that place? All these things you can look at and find out, wow, okay, so all these other details in the account, they do demonstrate the fact that those who were giving evidence were living at that time in that place and they cared about the details.

So does that help their testimony at all? I think it ought to. Is that verifiable? Well, it's verifiable in a sense that they've done studies on the percentage of the proportions of names and how names were written down. They get everything right. There's a wonderful book you've recommended here on that recommendation. I bought it. It's very easy read by P.J. Williams from Cambridge, Tyndale College in Cambridge. And it's... Can we trust the Gospels? Can we trust the Gospels? He goes into all of these details. It's very simple to read. He doesn't overstress his point. It's not a long book, but it goes through all of these things. And his point was, look at these things were contemporaneous with the, written and contemporaneous with the events themselves.

They have all of the characteristics of good history. They weren't written a hundred years later by someone else who made all these things up. There is no way to account for the kinds of detail that we find there. people couldn't research things a hundred years later and make a phony thing that fit like this. Oh, there is a phony. And it's the Gospel of Thomas. And that was Second Century. More than one phony.

Yeah, more than one. And they fail all these tests. They fail all these tests. So just on the names, in the Gospel of Thomas, there were only two names that matched the names of that period of time in ancient Palestine. And that was Jesus and Thomas, all the rest of Egyptian names. because that's where it was written. Not so in the Gospels. They have all kinds of names of people,

and it turns out when they do the archaeological analysis of it, as you pointed out, they fall within the same proportions as was the naming proportionally in the population and a whole bunch of other things like that. You know, naming of different towns, naming of different waters. And by the way, you know,

sometimes they call it the Sea of Galilee, the Sea, and sometimes they call it the lake, and Luke, who is from the coast of the Mediterranean, doesn't call it the sea. That's not a sea. That's a lake, man. I know what a sea looks like, but the Galilean fishermen didn't have that kind of exposure. This was the biggest body of water for them. They call the Sea of Galilee or Tiberius, which is one of the names, local names of the sea.

So in other words, you get these kinds of things that are utterly consistent. with multiple authors speaking about these locations, with the names that they would normally use in common discourse, which are different from each other. You're not going to pick up these details 100 years later, and this is part of the point PJ Williams is making in this piece, and it's very compelling when you read it. So this is meant to show that the Gospels are reliable documents historically and accurately depicting the details of that period of time in that location. And by the way, that's the way most historians take it, except for the supernatural.

And then you wonder, why do they accept everything but not the supernatural? Now something else is at work here in terms of their assessment. It would be kind of curious if this whole religion has started if there had been no supernatural. What exactly was starting in Jerusalem? what movement started, the whole thing was centered on the idea. And some people say, oh, they didn't think it was a physical resurrection. But you can clearly see in Acts where in their preaching, they talk about how David died and was in the grave. So this passage, yeah, this passage couldn't be about him because Jesus rose from the dead. It's about Jesus. So there are indications that it was a physical resurrection. It's central to everything in, in the letters, in Acts, in their preaching, the resurrection was central to this. Yeah, empty tomb. Also, the physical body is gone, and a spiritual resurrection is not a

resurrection. It's a ghost. You know, it's not a resuscitated body. That's what a resurrection is. So what exactly started back then if it had nothing to do with the supernatural? So now you have, all right, we have these reasons to think that the witnesses were reliable in all of these minor ways that they didn't bother to lie about or weren't sloppy about. So why would you assume that anything they say that has a major reason why this whole religion started in the first place? Why would you just dismiss that? Of course, Cold Case Christianity is another example of a book you could read where J. Warner Wallace looks at why you should trust these eyewitnesses and believe what they say. But unless you come at this with the idea that the supernatural doesn't happen, then you have to take this seriously.

You know, you mentioned Jay Warner. I was just thinking about him because one of the things he's included in his talks, it's probably in the book. But he talks about this bias. And he says, here you've got two roads. You could say, rose from the dead or didn't rise from the dead. okay and then all these signs he puts on the road to he rose from the dead all these evidences all right and then he says he didn't rise from the dead and there's a big barrier there all right and there's only one barrier he points out and that's the barrier you put there you made that up you're an antis supernaturalist i can't believe anything like that could ever happen that's the barrier you manufactured to put there but it's the only barrier to taking the rest of the facts and the details at face value and coming to the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead.

Well, thank you, Greg. And thank you, Kagan. Your question took up the whole show, which is great. All right. So... Send more, Kagan. Thank you so much for listening. You can send your question on X with the hashtag SDRask. Or if you go to our website at STR.org, all you have to do is look for our hashtag STRSk podcast page. And you will find a link right in the top left-hand corner of the page that has all the list of all of our hashtag STRS podcast, and that will take you right to where you can send us a question. We just ask that you keep it the size of what is formally known as a tweet, like two sentences,

maybe three, and we will consider that for the show. We really do look forward to hearing from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason. Thank you.