What Has God Done in 2,000 Years?

I was watching a W.L. Craig debate with biologist Lewis Wolford from 2007. Craig laid out his standard powerful argument for God´s existence in relation to the question, "Is God a delusion?" which is a reference to biologist Richard Dawkins´ book The God Delusion.. Wolford has the typical attitude and fallacies of scientific materialists, but he raised a good question in relation to Craig´s argument that the Resurrection of Jesus is part of a cumulative argument for God´s existence. Wolpert asked, "What has God done in 2,000 years?"

Craig´s first response to that question went to his fifth argument that Craig himself had had a spiritual experience. Wolford fit that into the reductionist view that "religion is only subjective." In Craig´s second response, Craig allows that God may have acted miraculously in 2,000 years, but that his argument was based on those two key moments. There are actually some scholarly perspectives that already begin to answer that question, as with Rodney Stark, Stanley Jaki, and Craig Keener´s work. Sociologist Rodney Stark began by looking at the behavior of the early Christians up to Constantine, and how it improved the quality of their lives at that time.

The primary act of God in the Resurrection of Jesus is followed by events like Pentecost, specific energizing events of a different nature than Paul´s own miraculous conversion. Pentecost alone occurred in four separate events with four different classifications of people.

The rapid spread of Christianity had been considered the result of "mass conversions." Stark´s study compared historical records of Mormon spread, and identified the social networks involved and a process of "exponential growth." In terms of the quality of Christian living, Stark´s book identifies at least five primary issues, including these four:

1. While others fled cities, Christians stayed in urban areas during plague, ministering and caring for the sick. 2. Christian populations grew faster because of the prohibition of birth control, abortion and infanticide. Since infanticide tended to affect female newborn more frequently, early Christians had a more even sex ratio and therefore a higher percentage of childbearing women than pagans. 3. To the same effect: Women were valued higher and allowed to participate in worship leading to a high rate of female converts. 5. Christians did not fight against their persecutors by open violence or guerrilla warfare but willingly went to their martyrdom while praying for their captors, which added credibility to their evangelism.

Stan Jaki studied scientific accomplishments in different cultures like ancient Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece. One key common factor that he identifies as interfering with full scientific methodology was thinking the Universe is eternal. In evaluating Babylonian accomplishments, Jaki notes that their underlying cosmogony in the Enuma elish was based on a personified event, in which a bloody battle leads to the mother goddess Tiamat being torn apart to form the sky, earth, waters, and air. The Babylonians had math puzzles up to second degree equations, but did not apply them to nature, which was personified in their understanding. While the ancient Greek philosophers began making naturalistic explanations, first, they had limited influence on their society as with Alexander the Great´s statue in gods´ temples. Their influence only extended to limited learning contexts that remained for elites and then largely isolated geniuses. Plato´s and Aristotle´s academies were destroyed, and the libraries never conducive to communities sufficient to establish viable social progress. Yet, Plato and his teacher Socrates were not primarily scientists at all. Socrates, in fact, had been spurred to his Socratic method by an odd statement by the Oracle of Delphi at the Apollo Temple to Socrates´ friend, Chaerephon, according to Plato. Chaerephon asked the Oracle, "Who is the wisest man in Athens?" The Oracle, after some reflection, replied "Socrates." The account of that reply motivated Socrates to begin using questions to evaluate the wisest men of Athens, and for Socrates to conclude that, "I am the wisest because when I do not know something, I know that I do not know it." The Oracle´s statement and its effect is fairly spectacular through a modern multidisciplinary lens building on Comparative Religious Studies and the Philosophy of Religion.

In Christianity, University-based scholars emerged from monastic schools. Christian monasticism itself had begun with Anthony of the Desert, who first dedicated himself to Jesus´ lifestyle as an ascetic. After some 30 years of psychological cycling through crises and cathartic relief in his practice, after a particularly memorable event of psychospiritual crisis, Anthony was seen to have achieved a tranqulity and rejuvenated vitality. His status also shifted and increased in response. He then had a dream in which he identified another ascetic, Paul of Thebes, along with directions. Anthony went and found Paul of Thebes at some 110 years old, and brought back a handmade shirt.

The consequences of Jesus´ Resurrection involved the justification of his teachings around 2 loving Commandments and spiritual practice in seeking the Kingdom of Heaven in prayer relationship with a parental God. Despite churches developing focuses on doctrines, Jesus´ teachings were carried forward. As sociological forms of authority developed, questions of hypocrisy and worse in contrast with integrity became more stark. The monasteries themselves were slightly different in operation with focuses on spiritual practice, but also showed how degrees of hypocrisy emerged against degrees of Christian integrity. That church-monastery axis existed with political leadership, largely post-Roman, quasi-Roman tribal after 476 AD. Charlemagne by 800 AD is renowned for having united that new social form into a society. Overall events had unfolded which represented the continuity of Christianity in situations which might have meant its being plunged into chaos and disorder. The Barbarian Invasions and the Islamic Invasions, not least of all. That analysis gets balanced by the nature of Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity and how "love" can be understood for its strengths now in modernity. By 1150, as monastic spiritual practice and integrity continued including scholarly study, the founding of the University of Paris was accompanied by the monk Thomas of Aquinas who took the First Cause argument thought up by, and rejected by, Aristotle. Aristotle rejected it because of his belief in an eternal Universe. Aristotle also believed that things could not move in curved lines, as part of his limiting assumptions. Aquinas´ First Cause variations provided an important part of the foundation of an omnipotent, lawful, and loving God as Creator, which became the philosophical foundation for challenging Aristotle´s assumptions in scientific philosophy. Bishop Tempier of Paris made a decree in the Pope´s name on that bases. Historian James Hannam discusses these issues in greater depth. Islam, by contrast, had inklings of scholarly accomplishments, but failed to galvanize adequately oriented institutions around them. The Christian Reconquest of Toledo in the 1080s recaptured one center of two for scholarship, and the Mongol massacre of Baghdad in 1258 took out the other and main center. Yet, Islam´s religious fervor has played an interesting role in its non-Christian religious culture in an axial theistic position against scientific and secular materialism. The role of hypocrisy and integrity becomes more complex in that context.

As Christianity propagated Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity in its mix of sociocultural developments, specific events suggest additional levels of influence. Pope Leo I´s meeting with Attila the Hun, Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther, Descartes´ vision, George Fox, Bernadette of Lourdes and the Lourdes´ medical clinic, Mary Baker Eddy, and the Swedenborgian CC Bonney´s initiative of the 1893 Chicago Parliament of World Religions, all represent a number of phenomena interesting to consider in reflection as part of a spectrum of God´s actions in the world in Jesus´ legacy. In the larger scope, the appearance of Islam, indigenous people´s reports like the Native Americans Handsome Lake and Black Elk and their visions, Harriet Tubman´s Afro-Am spiritual-religious experience and Louis Armstrong-Duke Ellington-Billie Holiday-John Coltrane sequence of experiences, Gandhi´s interfaith Hinduism and valuing of the Bible and Jesus, Carlos Santana´s Latin-Am version, the archeology of shamanism, and the anthropological study of shamanism are some additional events that merit discussion. Craig Keener´s book Miracles addresses the issue with abundant surveys and historical reference to the healing of Pascal´s niece, along with the principal problem that is the fallacy of David Hume´s skeptical extremism. Scientific philosophy and accumulation of knowledge in community doesn´t invalidate all eyewitness accounts to phenomena that fit in non-scientific philosophical categories, spiritual-religious and transcendent-supernatural, of reality.

What do you think about these points and what God has done in 2000 years?