On trial: ‘The Case for Christ,’ part 2

The Eyewitness Evidence: Can the Biographies of Jesus Be Trusted?

Welcome to the second part of this 16-part series on Lee’s Strobel’s “The Case for Christ.” If you missed it, here is Part I.

Strobel now gets to the meat of the book designed to investigate the trustworthiness of the New Testament authors and their accounts of the life of Jesus.

In Chapter 1, Strobel interviews Christian apologist Craig Blomberg and asks him how we know that the Matthew, Mark and Luke are the actual authors of the first three gospels. Blomberg then points, not to two sources outside of the church who can vouch for the authorship or the validity of the claims, but to two early church bishops, Papias (70 to about 155 A.D.) and Irenaeus (130-202 A.D.).

According to Blomberg,

Papias, who in about A.D. 125 specifically affirmed that Mark had carefully and accurately recorded Peter’s eyewitness observations. In fact, he said Mark “made no mistake” and did not include “any false statement.” And Papias said Matthews had preserved the teachings of Jesus as well.

Blomberg then read a quote from Irenaeus recounting that Mark was an interpreter of Peter and wrote down his teachings, while Luke wrote down the preachments of his teacher, Paul.

Strobel, in response to this news, said:

If we can have confidence that the gospels were written by the disciples Matthew and John, by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter, and by Luke, the historian, the companion of Paul, and sort of a first-century journalist, we can be assured that the events they record are based on either direct or indirect eyewitness testimony?

“Exactly,” Blomberg responded.

A few points here before we move on. First, there is no such thing as “indirect” eyewitness testimony. Either the event was witnessed in person or it is second-hand information. And the entirety of the gospels is from secondary sources. Mark, the earliest gospel written (c. 70, or perhaps a few years earlier), was allegedly a recreation from conversations with Peter and does not claim to be a direct witness to the event. Further, Papias and Irenaeus are not unbiased sources. They were church leaders, so of course they are going to vouch for the authenticity of the gospels.

Further still, Matthew never claims to be an eyewitness. Indeed, the quote that Blomberg reads from Irenaeus looks mysteriously similar to a quote from Papias. During their interview, Strobel said Blomberg reached for “a book” from which to read the quote from Irenaeus but conveniently did not provide the source of the quote itself. Consider the following:

  • “Matthew published his own Gospel among the Hebrews in their own tongue, when Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding the church there.” — unsourced quote from Irenaeus read by Blomberg
  • “Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.” — Papias, Eusebius in Hist. Eccl. 3.39

According to commentary from Peter Kirby at earlychristianwritings.com:

We know that Irenaeus had read Papias, and it is most likely that Irenaeus was guided by the statement he found there. That statement in Papias itself is considered to be unfounded because the Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek and relied largely upon Mark, not the author’s first-hand experience.

But let’s grant it. What if at least one of the gospels was written by someone who was actually there? Would that change anything about the gospel’s reliability?

Doubtful. Since Strobel constantly reminds us that he is a journalist, one would think that he would know that eyewitness testimony, in court cases and in written accounts, are not reliable because our memories are not reliable. The psychology has shown this.

In a lecture titled, “The Problem with Eyewitness Testimony,” by Stanford University professors Barbara Tversky and George Fisher, said several studies have been conducted that document people’s propensity to concoct events that didn’t happen:

Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory.4  Subjects were shown a slide of a car at an intersection with either a yield sign or a stop sign. Experimenters asked participants questions, falsely introducing the term “stop sign” into the question instead of referring to the yield sign participants had actually seen. Similarly, experimenters falsely substituted the term “yield sign” in questions directed to participants who had actually seen the stop sign slide. The results indicated that subjects remembered seeing the false image.

After some more discussion, Blomberg and Strobel move to the alleged claim that Jesus was God. Strobel asked Blomberg about the theological differences between the John and the other three gospels on the divinity of Jesus. Blomberg claimed that the gospels of Matthews and Mark included implicit references to Jesus’ deity:

Think of the story of Jesus walking on the water, found in Matthew 14:22-33 and Mark 6:45-52. Most English translations hide the Greek by quoting Jesus as saying, “Fear not, it is I.” Actually, the Greek literally says, “Fear not, I am.” Those last words were identical to what Jesus said in John 8:58, when he took upon himself the divine name “I am” …

OK, so investigating this claim is easy to do. Here is the original Greek in

  • Matthew 14:27: “εὐθὺς δὲ ἐλάλησεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς αὐτοῖς λέγων θαρσεῖτε ἐγώ εἰμι μὴ φοβεῖσθε” or in English: “But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.”
  • Mark 6:50: “πάντες γὰρ αὐτὸν εἶδον καὶ ἐταράχθησαν ὁ δὲ εὐθὺς ἐλάλησεν μετ’ αὐτῶν καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς θαρσεῖτε ἐγώ εἰμι μὴ φοβεῖσθε” and in English: “For they all saw him, and were troubled. And immediately he talked with them, and saith unto them, Be of good cheer: it is I; be not afraid.”

If you look carefully toward the end of the verse in Greek, you will find this word: “ἐγώ” in both verses. It is simply the word “I.” While the end of John 8:58 appears nearly identical in the Greek to the “I” reference in the other two verses, “εἶπεν αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς Ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι ἐγὼ εἰμί,” the verse in John is written in a completely different context than in Matthew and Mark. In the earlier two gospels, the disciples appear troubled by a man coming across the water, and Jesus verifies for them that it’s him. But in John, however, Jesus is speaking with the Jews and mentioned that Abraham was glad to see him come along. The Jews questioned how he could have spoken with Abraham given his young age. Jesus then replied, “Before Abraham was, I am,” where the words “ἐγὼ εἰμί” actually mean, ” I exist.” First, the various “I am” passages that appear in John are to be taken with a grain of salt anyway because John was the last and most embellished gospel of them all. Second, the early church editors would have wanted to make the New Testament appear to be a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, so they probably tied as many New Testament passages to the old, most notably in this case, Exodus 3:14, in which Yahweh handed down a tautology for the ages, “I am that I am.”

Blomberg was also misleading when asked about the “Son of Man” title often conferred on Jesus in the New Testament:

“Look, contrary to popular belief, ‘Son of Man’ does not primarily refer to Jesus’ humanity. Instead, it’s a direct allusion to Daniel 7:13-14.”

With that, he opened the Old Testament and read those words of the prophet Daniel.

Strobel’s language, “read those words,” seem to indicate a reverence for scripture, not the language of an objective reporter.

In any case, I suppose we’re just supposed to take Blomberg’s word for it that the passage “Son of Man” means is a “title of great exaltation” in Daniel and that the “Son of Man” references in the New Testament look back to Daniel. Again, the New Testament writers and their editors wouldn’t have it any other way.

Just one more quick point. Blombergs points out late in the chapter that the two earliest biographies we have of Alexander the Great were more than 400 years after his death, where as the first gospel was penned within closer proximity of Jesus’ death:

So whether the gospels were written sixty years or thirty years after the life of Jesus, the amount of time is negligible by comparison. It’s almost a nonissue.

This is an often-touted apologetic line. I won’t bother to look up when the first accounts were written of such and such figure in antiquity but the important point is this: no matter when the first account of other historic figures were written, this historic figure, Jesus, is supposed to be the most important figure in all of humanity, and all we have are four relatively short narratives that are equally short on detail. Why couldn’t several of the disciples get together to write an account? If their god were real and all-powerful, he could have made sure it passed through the ages unblemished. How about the 500 people who supposed saw Jesus after the resurrection? Where are their accounts? Comparing Alexander to a person who made the claims that Jesus did just will not do.

On trial: ‘The Case for Christ,” part 1

Here begins a new series investigating the claims in Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ.”

During my period of “wandering in the desert” somewhere between belief and skepticism and right up to my present day non-belief, I have been asked more than once to read this book, as well as “The Case for Faith” and other apologist manifestos. I am almost certain that I’ve already read both of these books at some point during my Christian tenure, most of what C.S. Lewis has had to say on the subject, “Handbook of Christian Apologetics” and others. None are convincing and fail because of their purposeful attempts at obscurantism. Lewis was the most erudite of the bunch, but for some reason, seemed to have convinced himself that Jesus could have only been a “lair,” “lunatic” or “lord” with no other options on the table. He didn’t seem to realize that Jesus could have been first, wrong about his purpose on Earth and second, fictionalized in total or in part by his supporters.

In any case, I recommend these two books by Strobel, not so much for their intellectual muster and arguments in favor of Jesus, but as a mental exercise for the non-believer to do what many, dare I say most, believers are too afraid or too intellectually lazy to do: reading and engaging with contrary opinions.

Introduction: Reopening the Investigation of a Lifetime

I was originally going to call this series “The Case Against The Case for Christ,” but quickly learned that Robert Price has already written a book by that name. Thus, I conjured a title that is just as fitting, since Strobel in “The Case for Christ” frames his introduction around a murder case that he worked as a reporter with the Chicago Tribune.  The murder trial involved a man who was wrongly accused of shooting a cop who responded to a dispute. The policeman was apparently carrying an illegal pen gun at the time of the incident. The pen gun fired inside his own pocket, resulting in a non-lethal wound. The officer subsequently pleaded guilty to misconduct and was fired, while the accusation against the man was dismissed.

After a source alerted him to the possibility of a different theory about the shooting — that the gun wound resulted from the pen gun — Strobel then makes the most baldly disingenuous statement that I could have fathomed at this early point in the book (p. 13):

When the police told me the case was airtight, I took them at their word and didn’t delve much further. But when I changed those lenses — trading my biases for an attempt at objectivity — I saw the case in a whole new light. Finally I allowed the evidence to lead me to the truth, regardless of whether it fit my original presuppositions (emphasis mine).

That was more than twenty years ago. My biggest lessons were yet to come .

Later (p. 14), he informs us that he has interviewed 13 “leading scholars and authorities” with “impeccable academic credentials” to give weight to his case. If Strobel is going to investigate the case for Jesus from a place of objectivity, one might think, given his background in journalism, that he would interview scholars with different viewpoints to get the fullest picture possible, for instance, Price, John Dominic Crossan, Neil Silberman, Bart D. Ehrman, Israel Finkelstein and others. As any good journalist knows, there are not just one or two sides to a story, but in some cases, three or four. While Strobel is disingenuous, he is not stupid; he knows that his general church audience, and maybe even the stray non-believer who happens to peruse is book, may take the professionals that he presents as legitimate sources. And Strobel is betting on that fact. Readers of this blog can no longer claim ignorance.

So, before we get into the meat of the book, let’s first briefly take a look at these 13 “scholars” and see just how impeccable their credentials are in view of Strobel’s claim of objectivity:

1. Craig Blomberg — A professor of the New Testament at Denver Seminary. The seminary’s website has this mission:

Denver Seminary prepares men and women to engage the needs of the world with the redemptive power of the gospel and the life-changing truth of Scripture. Through real relationships you’ll find real answers to help bring real change to the world.

Blomberg is author of “The Historical Reliability of the Gospels,” “From Pentecost to Patmos: An Introduction to Acts through Revelation” and “Contagious Holines: Jesus’ Meals with Sinners.”

2. Bruce Metzger — Formerly a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and biblical translator. According to his obituary:

On both academic and popular levels, Metzger was well-known for his involvement (since 1952) with the RSV and especially NRSV translations. From 1977-1990 he was Chair of the Committee of Translators for the NRSV, and was largely responsible for seeing it through the press. His association with the RSV and NRSV was given additional visibility by his editorship of various study Bibles and tools based on these translations, as well as his service as Chair of the Committee on Translation of the American Bible Society 1964-1970.

3. Edwin Yamauchi — A Christian author and professor of history at Miami University in Ohio. He is a founding member of the Oxford Bible Fellowship.

4. John McRay — A New Testament professor emeritus at Wheaton College, McRay is just another Christian apologist. In his 2008 book, “Archaeology and the New Testament,” McRay writes in his preface:

In these pages we invite readers to step inside the current study of archeology as it relates to the New Testament period. It is for those who wish a convenient, one-volume introduction to the field. If it stimulates its readers to further research, reflect, and respect the New Testament as the historical revelation of the Word of God, it will have fulfilled its author’s hopes (emphasis mine).

Further, Wheaton’s mission statement reads

Wheaton College exists to help build the church and improve society worldwide by promoting the development of whole and effective Christians through excellence in programs of Christian higher education.

and carries the motto:

This mission expresses our commitment to do all things – “For Christ and His Kingdom.”

5. Gregory Boyd — The senior pastor and co-founder of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn.

6. Ben Witherington III — A United Methodist Church pastor and a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary.

7. Dr. Gary Collins — A psychologist who taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is author of “Christian Coaching: Helping Others Turn Potential into Reality,” “The Biblical Basis of Christian Counseling” and “Christian Counseling: A Comprehensive Guide” and is as qualified to provide an unbiased view of Jesus as James Dobson, another Christian psychologist who can not be trusted to provide any kind of objective view of the New Testament.

8. D.A. Carson — A research professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and a former pastor.

9. Louis Lapides — Formerly with Beth Ariel Fellowship in Sherman Oaks, Calif., he holds degrees from Dallas Baptist University and Talbot School of Theology.

10. Dr. Alexander Metherell — Strobel outright admits here that Metherell is a Christian:

I’ll be honest: at times I wondered what was going on inside Dr. Metherell’s head. With scientific reserve, speaking slowly and methodically, he gave no hint of any inner turmoil as he calmly described the chilling details of Jesus’ demise. Whatever was going on underneath, whatever distress it caused him as a Christian to talk about the cruel fate that befell Jesus, he was able to mask with a professionalism born out of decades of laboratory research.

11. William Lane Craig — One of the most well-known Christian apologists in the nation.

12. Gary Habermas — Another of the most well-known Christian apologists.

13. J.P. Moreland — Take a look at his website. This one speaks for itself.

I have only added the title “Dr.” on those names if the sources were, in fact, medical doctors from legitimate institutions. Every single one of them are at the very least, Christian, and most of them are or have been active apologists.

So by every account and right out of the gate, Strobel betrays the precedent that he claims to have set as a journalist. All of these individuals live their lives based on one worldview, and one can not get closer to the truth by examining only one, or even two, sides of any story.

Remember one of Strobel’s opening lines: “Finally I allowed the evidence to lead me to the truth, regardless of whether it fit my original presuppositions.” Actually, this can’t be further from the truth. He seems to have purposefully selected people who were going to tell him what he wanted him to hear. Further, he admits on page 15 that he challenged these “experts” with the same objections that he raised “when I was a skeptic,” indicating that he was no longer a skeptic when he conducted the interviews. So, there you have it. Strobel becomes convinced in the truth of Christ and then seeks the counsel of various apologists across the nation to help write his equally apologetic book, thereby confirming his views, which he never sought to challenge in the first place.

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The God question: My testimony

The debate on the god question has come up recently on Facebook between a couple friends of mine, and I thought it might be interesting if I laid out and clarified a few points about my own experiences regarding this matter to attempt to come around to an overall theory. Some family, friends, former church members of mine have probably noticed peculiar postings of mine regarding religion and God, and I thought an explanation was in order. This post took me a couple weeks to write (Thus the reason for no other recent posts), so bear with me. I’m not saying my conclusion won’t or can’t change, but my thoughts right now as they stand are recorded in this post. To borrow a religious term, here is my “testimony:”

First, as I have stated to a couple people in the last year, I set about in Oct. 2008 or so to the task of trying to figure out precisely why I believed what I proclaimed to believe. I will say here that I was raised in the Christian tradition, as most people in the southeastern United States are, and spent many years performing musically and otherwise toward that end. I sang with my grandfather, whom I miss to this day, in more than one Southern gospel group. I played acoustic and electric guitar for seven or more years in a contemporary-style church in Upstate, South Carolina. Until I reached college, I knew little of teachings other than what was in the Bible. Despite taking and passing a philosophy class and many English classes which served to, at least, introduce certain issues that would later challenge my faith, I maintained my core beliefs through college and even through numerous years after college.

Like so many with physical ailments who have wanted desperately to believe in a god who had the power to, not only save souls, but to physically heal, I tried my best to read the Bible and believe. In the years after college, my life was largely dominated by loneliness and despair over various issues, the most immediate of which would be emphysema.

I had heard stories that many people back home prayed me out of certain death when I was a baby hospitalized for 3 1/2 years in New York City, apparently saving me from dying from a critical immune system disorder. I don’t want to discredit or marginalize family members’ and friends’ efforts or concerns back home. They were doing what they thought was best.

So, poof, after much research and after three years of testing and poking and prodding at me, doctors came up with a way to give me an unprecedented unmatched bone marrow transplant to set my immune system on the right course. In the early 1980s, this was no small thing.

Now, I’m wise enough to recognize that science and research saved me in my infancy. I’m wise enough to know that, had I been lying in a crib inside my home in South Carolina, with the same prayers but without the same science and medical treatment, I would be a memory, and would probably not have even made it past my first year. So, at 4 1/2 years old, with medical research providing and setting my path toward adulthood, I set out on a vast world that I had never known cramped inside my little, sterile hospital-world.

And, of course, my parents not only gave me life … but a second life. I was a dead man, but they packed up their things in their early 20s at the time (I’m now 32 and can’t imagine doing such a thing at their age) and moved 900 miles north to a cockroach-ridden Manhattan apartment with their young daughter … all for me. For all my hard-boiled, emotional determinism, the thought of what they went through to keep me alive still brings a lump to my throat … and I’m thankful beyond words.

Back to religion, I decided a year or so back that it would be the most insincere and dishonest thing that I could imagine if I were to continue to lead the people in church worship without believing myself in the words of the songs I was playing (I think even believers can agree with me on that point.) I surmised that it would also be distasteful to not know full well why I believed in what the folks around me were singing, and not be able to articulate what I believed, and why I believed it. I concluded, even before I began questioning faith, that to believe and live my entire life and then die some day without knowing precisely why I believed such and such, without evidence and without a good explanation for any of it, essentially giving my entire life to something, sheepishly, was a most foolish and tragic thing (In fact, the word “tragic” probably represents an understatement).

Believing simply based on a “feeling” that we get on Sunday morning in the presence of nice music and other believers — which is all it is, since there’s not a stitch of evidence for any of it — was not good enough for me, and this was the realization that hit me between the eyes at some point last year. I can, perhaps, pinpoint the precise time. It may have been during a long car ride to Boston with my wife, when I had a fantastically long time to do a lot of thinking.

To catalog a few of the works I’ve studied thus far that have influenced me one way or the other since and before that particular trip:

  • “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
  • “God: A Biography” by Jack Miles
  • “Mere Christianity” “Surprised by Joy,” “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis
  • “The Case for Christ” and “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel
  • “Godless” by Dan Barker
  • “Why I Became An Atheist” by John Loftus
  • “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine
  • “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris
  • “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” By Albert Camus
  • “Notes from the Underground” By Fyodor Dostoevsky (To a lesser degree, “The Brothers Karamzov” and “Crime and Punishment”
  • This does not mention, of course, most of the Old and New testaments, numerous Christian commentaries, two decades of Christian teaching from various workshops, sermons and classes, and many of the gospels and texts that did not make it into the “official” King James Bible as pieced together by various church officials centuries ago.

I’m under no illusion that my recent thoughts and studies are crushing to any possibility, or any fraction of a possibility, that I might supernaturally be made better physically some day (For I deny even the possibility of a being capable of such things … nothwithstanding his unwillingness). I dare say no one has called out more to God than I for answers, even for answers about his own existence. No one has pleaded more with God for help. No one has been on their knees more than me. But I’ve heard nothing. Not one thing but my own voice, until eventually I got the impression that my prayers were merely floating to the ceiling and falling back down like stillborn stars. So, I got off my knees and determined, like the human that I am, to find the truth.

Believers will probably question this, saying something like, “Well, you can’t just give up. God is faithful to answer prayer in his time on his watch” or with, “God answers all prayer with either a ‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ or ‘Maybe.'” But those are the only three possible options, aren’t they? We can write off or explain away any unanswered prayer (or perceived answered prayer) by that logic to help God escape an explanation for his own silence.

We have, indeed, for centuries, received nothing at all but silence from the God of the Old Testament, just as we have received no recent word from Jesus or Zeus or Apollo or Allah or Osiris. Thousands of years have passed and not an utterance. Does that not strike anyone else as peculiar? Believers, again, will say the Bible is God’s revealed word or his instruction manual and that he exists in the hearts and minds of those who are filled with the Holy Spirit because they have believed in him. Well, I have believed — I have with all my heart — and other than some hormones jostled around, stimulated by some inspiring tune in the company of believers, have felt or heard nothing but my own voice.

So, I know there will be those to whom these words are very troubling — family, friends, former churchgoers, etc. but please know that I expect none of the same thoughts from any of you and am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m merely stating my experiences, and don’t particularly want this to meltdown into a large debate. Again, I did not set out at the start to disprove anything. I set out to find the truth. And these truths we can’t escape: Earth is billions of years old, Earth exists on a spiral arm of our galaxy, an insignificant spot, and not the center of the galaxy as many of our forebearers thought (which, by the way, gave creedance to the argument that we are the special planet, and a special species, in all of creation). The Earth will one day be uninhabited by people once again, not by a rapture, but either by a wayward asteroid or gamma ray burst or by the sun losing power. The truth is the canonical Bible contains many irreparable self-contradictions; condones slavery, mass slaughter, rape, the mutilation or altering of children’s genitalia, among other things; and cannot even get the details straight about the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Again, when I set about my studies, I was not seeking hope or spiritualism or miracles or wishful-thinking, I was seeking the truth, which in the 17th century when John Milton was alive, “a wicked race of deceivers … took the virgin Truth (and) hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds.” But they are not at the four winds anymore. Truth is much closer to us in modern America. So, at least at this juncture, I have concluded that the ancient, contradictory books of the Old and New testaments, written in a time of widespread myth and legend, are not good enough to make me, first, believe, and second, to base my entire life on such things contained therein.

I feel compelled to say that I apologize to certain people (of whom I still hold a great deal of respect) for that statement, whom I know, would want me to conclude differently, but that’s how I feel. The Christian tradition is so embedded in this part of the country (the Southeast), that to say such things, is almost like seceding a second time from the Union. But again, I ask, what’s more important? The truth or wishful thinking? When I set out about this, I resolved to be comfortable with whatever philosophical pathway on which my studies took me down. And that’s what we all must do.

And at some point, all us of have to make a similar choice: Do we want to be complacent in living our lives for a faith that may or may not, in reality, be true, or can we mentally and emotionally handle another possibility: that we are an insignificant dot in a vast, vast universe. As a friend of mine was saying, we need religion. We do indeed. But can’t we be strong enough to move past it and accept our place in the cosmos? As one writer, John Loftus, said that we humans think we are so special that we can’t imagine a fate that would see us go extinct like all the rest of life on Earth. Yet, that is our fate. Our extreme intelligence compels us to think of other worlds or other dimensions like heaven or hell, but our humanity also compels us to surmise that we are on a small planet in an insignificant galaxy, of which, there are millions. It is quite believable to think other species in some undiscovered galaxy thought themselves self-important, like us, and then, saw their own existence come to a crashing hault.

Of course, we may never know 100 percent if there is a god or not and we may never know 100 percent how life began, but I think we can be pretty sure it did not happen as the Bible, with its self-contradictions, recounts. (Note: I do not cite examples of the Bible’s contradictions here because they are well documented and this post is long as is. Search Google for “bible contradictions” and you can view them for yourself.)

For me, the option that we are an insignificant dot in a vast universe, takes much more wherewithall, and frankly, is a quite liberating axiom, to know that we are, at the core, connected and interconnected with the universe, not just Earth, and everything in the universe is quite a beautiful thing, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson noted.

Thus, again, I did not seek hope (specifically for my health conditions or otherwise) or karma or spirituality or wishful thinking. I sought the truth. For truth, should we reference the record of science, which says this planet has existed for billions of years and will again be vanquished or a book authored by superstitious people thousands of years ago during a time consumed with myth and legend? I have to side with the former.