Stephen Colbert vs. Ricky Gervais on God’s Existence

I came across this clip form the Colbert show the other day, where he had Ricky Gervais on. Colbert brings up the topic of God’s existence and here’s how their debate went:

Gervais gets a rousing applause after saying this:

“If we take something like, any fiction, any holy book…and destroyed it. In a thousand years time it wouldn’t come back just as it was. If you took every science book, every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back; ’cause all the same tests would be the same result.”

On the surface, there seems to be an undeniable logic at work in what Gervais is saying. Science is more “true” than any truth found in a holy book. Why? Because you can prove it over and over and over and over and over.

Colbert even seems persuaded by it. He has no rebuttal except to say, “That’s good. That’s really good.” (Or maybe he just got caught up in Gervais’ charming and alluring English accent!)

But as I thought about it some more, the logic ends up being rather hollow. The truth of a holy book, and more poignantly, the truth of someone considered holy, like Jesus, is not that it can be proved over and over. The opposite is actually at work.

For Christians, the truth of Jesus is that he shows us something we would never have thought to be true had we not encountered the truth in and through his singularly unique life. In him, we are brought face to face with something we couldn’t and wouldn’t have figured out on our own.

Our problem is not that we need to discover what can be proven by anyone at any time in any place. Our problem is that we need to be shown what we cannot know except through revelation. That’s what, as Christians, we say Scripture is all about.

It is revelation.

And that is ultimately what we believe is given most fully to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Here we are given the truest and most complete revelation of God and God’s good intentions for us. Of course, it’s not something that can be verified or predicted in a test tube with a Bunsen burner. But that’s precisely the point.

The best and truest things in life are often things that are not repeatable.

The fact that science is reproducible in every generation, while significant, isn’t all that exceptional. What is exceptional is a life that was lived so truthfully and so beautifully that death could not hold it down. And over the course of history, it is one that has proven to be one in a billion.

Which, seems to me, makes it all the more truthful.