"I have Jesus in my heart".... just suppose… I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself….

“Show me,” you might say. I open a briefcase pull out a large envelope, show you an MRI of my heart. —but you fail to see Jesus.

“Where’s Jesus?” you ask.

“Oh, he’s right there,” I reply, pointing at the MRI. “Did I neglect to mention that Jesus cannot be seen by the unbeliever?”
You propose doing heart surgery to find any evidence of Jesus in my heart.

“Good idea,” I say, “but Jesus is invisible to the non believer.”

Then you’ll use newly refined scientific equipment that detects and alerts of anomalies in human tissue.

“Good idea, but Jesus is invisible to your newly developed scientific equipment.”

You’ll take tissue samples and use newly developed stains that would make anything other than the actual tissue glow green and visible.

“ANOTHER good idea, except Jesus has is not of this world, and that will not allow the stains to work.”

And so on, I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s the difference between an invisible Jesus and no Jesus at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that Jesus is not in my heart? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it is true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that this Jesus in my heart is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enters your mind. But then why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility….

Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you they have Jesus in their hearts—but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if Jesus were really in hearts all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient Middle East myths about Jesus weren't myths after all…

Gratifyingly, some Jesus-size footprints in the sand are now reported. But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself: On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another Jesus believer shows up being healed of heart disease and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of Jesus’s presence in his heart. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways for the body to heal itself instead of some magical invisible Jesus. Such “evidence”—no matter how important the Jesus advocates consider it—is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the Jesus hypothesis, to be open to future data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.



Thank you Dr Carl Sagan, for removing the "dragon's" from many a "garage"....

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