Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - What’s the Best Explanation?

Episode Date: December 8, 2019

Alan explains how to use a common yet powerful question to help point people to God. Download the mp3...

Imagine driving home one evening to find a broken window on the side of your house. Now, as you go inside, you realize your 80-inch 4K television is missing. You know, the one that you just bought for the big game. Now, you glance down and you notice footprints that lead from the broken window to the missing television. And then you immediately ask yourself a question. What happened? missing television. And then you immediately ask yourself a question. What happened? You have now begun a common yet very powerful and rational process that is also a tool that can help point people to God. And this type of thinking is known as abductive reasoning, or sometimes people refer

to it as inference to the best explanation. Now, there are two steps that are involved in this particular process. First is you gather facts. And second is you ask what's the best explanation for those facts. Now, it's important to realize that your answer must make sense of all of the facts, not just some of the facts. Now, in the scenario that I just mentioned, you observed three facts. Number one, you observed that there was a broken window. Number two, that there is a missing television. And number three, you recognize that there's footprints. Now, the natural next step to ask is, what's the best explanation for those facts? Now, suppose you surmise that a tornado blew through your neighborhood, okay? It broke the window and it sucked out the television.

Now, that probably wouldn't be the best explanation because although a tornado can break a window and perhaps even suck a television out of your house, it can't account for the footprints or the fact that nothing else was broken or missing in your house, it can't account for the footprints or the fact that nothing else was broken or missing in your house, right? So notice the tornado only explains two of the three facts, but it does not explain all of them. So your next thought then is, okay, well, maybe a thief stole your television. You know, he or she, you know, women love those new 4K televisions as well, right? He probably broke through the window, tracked dirt through the house, and stole your television. Now, notice your thief explanation makes sense of all of the facts, not just some

of them. And so, we would say that it has the greatest explanatory power of those two theories that I propose, and therefore is the best explanation. Now, scientists and researchers engage in this type of reasoning all the time. So an archaeologist, for example, who discovers a sharp pointy rock, he'll ask, is the shape of this rock the result of a natural force? Or did a person chisel it out for the purpose of making an arrowhead? Which is the best explanation? Or did a person chisel it out for the purpose of making an arrowhead? Which is the best explanation? Or perhaps a detective who finds a dead body in an alley will ask, did this person die of natural causes, suicide, or was he killed? And so notice he'll gather clues and asks, what's the best theory that explains the facts of this case? Now, this type of reasoning is equally at home in

many apologetics-related subjects, and we can use it to make a case for the Christian worldview. And here are two quick examples. With recent advances in technology, scientists can study microscopic things like DNA molecules. Now, it turns out that DNA contains a four-character digital code. In humans, this code contains the design bl a four-character digital code. In humans, this code contains the design blueprints for making the human body. For example, geneticist and biochemist Craig Venter, known for developing the first draft sequence of the human genome, listen to what he says. Quote, Life is basically the result of an information process, a software process.

Our genetic code, he says, is our software, and our cells are dynamically, constantly reading our genetic code, end quote. The process is far more elaborate, of course, than we can mention here, but we do know at least three facts. Number one, we know that DNA contains a four-character digital code, and this is nothing short of information very analogous to computer software. The second fact that we know is this, that the code found in DNA is the blueprint for how to construct every cell, every tissue, and every organ in our body. And the third fact that we know is that there are systems in the body that read the DNA code and then manufacture tiny parts based on that code. And of course, these

microparts assemble to form cells, tissues, and organs. Now, given these three facts that we know, we can use, again, abductive reasoning to determine the best explanation. Now, what best accounts for the design blueprints encoded in our DNA? Well, we know from our universal experience that program code comes from a programmer. And even the simplest smartphone apps require an intelligent mind to write software code. And the same should be true of DNA. There must be an intelligent mind that provides the design blueprints in the four-character digital code present in the software of our DNA. Now, let me give you another example of how this type of

abductive reasoning can be applied to a particular apologetics-related subject. We can apply this to the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Now, historians, and by the way, when I say historians, I'm talking even secular or atheist historians, these people have acknowledged a dozen facts that pertain to the death of Jesus. Now, let me just mention four of these facts. The first is this. Jesus died by crucifixion.

This is a well-known fact that historians, even secular non-Christian historians, acknowledge. A second fact is this. Jesus' tomb was found empty three days later. A third fact is that the disciples of Jesus had experiences in which they saw the risen Jesus. Now, again, historians don't believe, at least secular historians, they don't believe that they actually saw Jesus, but rather they are confident that these disciples had experiences in which they believed they saw the risen Jesus. And the fourth fact that historians all acknowledge is a true fact is that Paul, who once persecuted Christians in the church, had a dramatic reversal in his behavior and began proclaiming he had encountered the risen Jesus Christ.

Now, we have these four facts, and then we ask the question, what's the best explanation for those four facts? Now, although naturalistic explanations, like, for example, Jesus swooned, meaning he passed out, or the disciples lied, or the body of Jesus was stolen, or the disciples went to the wrong tomb, these are all naturalistic explanations. Although these explanations can explain some of the facts, none of the naturalistic explanations can account for all of the facts. explanations can account for all of the facts. For example, claiming the disciples visited the wrong tomb can account for fact number one, but not for facts two, three, and four. Or claiming that the disciples stole the body can account for facts numbers one and two, but it cannot account for facts three and four. And so you can kind of go through all of these naturalistic explanations, and what you come to realize is that none of the naturalistic explanations can explain all of the facts that we know to be true.

The only explanation that seems to make sense of all of the facts is that Jesus rose bodily from the grave. That's the theory that has the most explanatory power. And so this type of reasoning, abductive reasoning, or inference to the best explanation, is an incredibly powerful tool because it draws upon a well-accepted principle of reasoning. And it's the approach that I take when I'm training believers on these topics, and it's one that you can use too.