Prove it

When I was first in junior high school, I came up with my own fun little game. It was a simple little game, and what made it fun was the fact that it was pure irritation to everyone who got sucked into it. The game was an exercise in skepticism. It was early Hume. The idea was that to whatever anyone suggested as a truth statement I would respond with "Prove it!" "My name is Ted." "Prove it." Any proof that might be offered received the same treatment. "Well, that's what my parents named me." "Prove it." It was a simple refusal to accept any propositional truth statement at face value. And the reason it was so infuriating to those on the receiving end was that as long as I was unwilling to accept standard evidence at face value, it was really difficult for them to prove anything. The game was fun ... for me. Of course, it didn't last long. One day in our morning carpool the older girl in the car took me on. "I'm a girl." I responded in kind, "Prove it." My mom put an immediate end to the game.

It was a silly junior higher's game, but it was effective in pointing to a truth. The definition of "proof" is essentially "evidence sufficient to produce belief in its truth." Therein lies the trouble. As in the case of my juvenile game, if agreement is necessary for "proof", then simply refusing to agree makes "proof" impossible. We see this in many places in life. A loving mother, faced with the DNA evidence, the video evidence, the written confession of her son having committed a murder, can still say, "No, my boy would never do such a thing." There is still the Flat Earth Society, a group quite sure that all the evidence that proves the Earth is a sphere is simply trumped up evidence. You can still find people who believe that we never put a man on the moon. And some still believe that O. J. didn't do it. Pile up the evidence all you want. In some areas of life, it is possible for some people to simply say, "Prove it" and proof becomes impossible.

Over at Moral Science Club, Jim takes on a skeptic who has tried to take on one of Christianity's proof statements: "The disciples wouldn't die for a lie." The idea is that those who saw Christ after His resurrection preached that resurrection and were killed for it. Why, if that resurrection was a lie, would they do it? Jim does a decent job of answering, and I won't address it. What I see in the skeptic's approach, however, is exactly my junior high game. We say, "Those who witnessed the resurrection were killed for preaching it." And the savvy 21st century skeptic says, "Prove it." You see, this is an argument from historical evidence. Try proving anything historical. Try providing irrefutable evidence that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, that Alexander the Great ever lived, or that Archimedes was not an owl. It's the same argument other skeptics use about Jesus. To our simple proposition, "Jesus lived" they respond "Prove it." Oh, and you can't use that Bible thing. We deny that. Church history? That's out. Tradition? Nonsense. Other writings that agree? Nope! You see, if you try to use anything at all, it's a simple thing to demand proof of that evidence, and the "prove it" pile becomes too big to manage.

It's an interesting thing in life. Some things are simple to "prove", simple to provide sufficient evidence so that most everyone concurs. We can "prove" that 2 + 2 = 4 by holding up two fingers on one hand and two on the other and counting. Most people accept that. It's when the truth proposed enters the realm of real effect that it gets more sticky. If the truth that you are proposing will have an effect on my life, I'm going to be more careful. And, much like that devoted mother, there are times that the proposition is just too much for us to allow. In these cases, the human being is fully capable of rejecting all evidence and denying that such a thing is "proved". In these cases, what can you do? Not much, really. Unfortunately, in this case, the claim is the Gospel. The stakes are high. The issues are precious to both sides. And evidence often becomes irrelevant. There is no battling the true skeptic. The only hope here is an Intervention. That's my prayer.