In a speech Nikita Khrushchev once remarked that 'Gagarin flew into space, but God wasn't there.' I assume that Mr Khrushchev was speaking glibly, and that he was aware of the fact that if Gagarin had seen God in orbit, Christianity's picture of God would have been proved false!!!
This gets at, however, a popular misconception about our understanding of reality. Often in conversations the following statement is trotted out, "well, of course the ancients believed the Bible to be true, that was before people knew any better, they believed all sorts of superstitions you know..."
(This of course, begs the question, whether or not we have any superstitions of our own, but we'll save the conversation about American idolatry and cultural superstition for another day)
This simply doesn't make any sense.
A simple read through the very Bible that skeptics say can only believed by the gullible and unsophisticated will show precisely the opposite. If the miraculous was so commonly believed by the ancients why were they so incredulous at Jesus own miracles?
A simple reading of scripture will establish that resurrection was known to be impossible in the ancient world; the Christian belief was never that resurrection was a natural phenomenon that would happen to everyone as a matter of course, but rather that human nature was destined for death apart from the working of the Creator God. This is the very implications of the Resurrection! Jesus' victory over death is seen as precisely the first-fruits of the unraveling of the established order of things. God was doing something new in the world that needed to be seen precisely on the order of magnitude as the creation of the cosmos out of nothing. (Read the intro to the Gospel of John alongside the intro to Genesis)
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