Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) For many, the White Queen is a poster girl for faith. Her imagination has colonized her intellect. She’s developed—with much practice—an alchemical ability to turn fantasies into facts. This talent is desired by some, derided by most. Some of my friends are like Alice and they consider me the White Queen. They reckon I’ve managed to suspend or sideline my rational faculties, at least enough to make room for certain impossibilities like the resurrection. As though one day I relented, OK, fine, if this is the intellectual price I have to pay to be a Christian, let me add this item to my inventory of unpopular opinions: a corpse reanimated one Sunday morning. There! To be clear, this is not how Easter faith works. If you want to know how it does work, let me provide a tour. For any Alices who are willing to go down the rabbit hole, here’s a journey to faith that takes in three Hs. No need to be a White Queen—reasonable people like you can believe in the resurrection. How? By considering the heavens, history, and him. Heavens Here are three features of our world that are already Easter-like. They already have a life-from-the-dead shape to them. I don’t offer these as watertight proofs of God. But I do raise them as suggestive pointers. Everything has come from nothing. It’s not just Christians who believe in improbabilities. We all live inside a glorious absurdity called existence. Here we are. We needn’t be. But out of nothing, everything. Out of the void, life. It’s incredibly Easter-like. It’s not just Christians who believe in improbabilities. We all live inside a glorious absurdity called existence. Order has come from chaos. There’s an intricacy to life and to our life-sustaining universe. Physical forces had to be “just so.” (Look up “the fine-tuning of the universe” to get a sense of how improbable a life-permitting universe is). Yet wouldn’t you know it, against all the odds—a cosmos, not a chaos! But more than such remarkable physical order, there’s also the emergence of biology. Life has come from nonlife. As a Christian, I believe that on Easter Sunday the nonliving Jesus came to life. Out of lifelessness and entropy, an extraordinary vitality burst forth. This is undoubtedly a miracle. But a purely biological account of our origins tells a story much more extraordinary. According to a naturalistic explanation, all life has emerged from nonlife—and without a God of resurrection to work the wonder. Since this is the nature of our life-from-the-dead universe, a different question emerges: Are things made more absurd or less absurd by believing in the God of resurrection? But it’s not just the heavens that point the way to Easter faith—there’s history too. 2 MORE REASONS WE CAN TRUST THE RESURRECTION | 
