Science and the Resurrection Accounts

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God, I’m Jim Stump. It’s just me again. Last time I did this was Christmas, when I gave a short meditation saying it’s OK not to feel merry at Christmastime. The download numbers for that episode were about normal, but the response I got from it was among the strongest ever. I received lots of personal messages from people saying it named what they were feeling too. One person asked if I might be depressed. Maybe I was a little bit, but there were some depressing circumstances. And I’m happy to report that at least some of those circumstances have changed, and I’m feeling some better now. I think that’s within the normal range of how we ought to feel about things.

But I should caution you in taking much mental health advice from me. I have no professional expertise in that field. One time when my kids were elementary school aged, they had some friends over. I was in the next room but could hear them talking when the conversation turned to what their parents did for work. One of my kids said, “My dad’s a doctor… but not the kind that helps people.” So please don’t mistake me for giving professional mental health advice.

I will simply say that some of the clouds have lifted in my own circumstances — both metaphorically and literally. My part of the world had a long, gray winter. Now the sun has been shining, and my daily exercise routine has shifted from my windowless basement to the outdoors again. We just interviewed the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman. In one of his books he argues for the good of spending time in nature. Our species — let alone those that preceded us — evolved for hundreds of thousands of years with a tight connection to nature. There are all kinds of studies that show how connecting to nature leads to improved mental health outcomes.

My small group at church includes a medical doctor — which evidently is the kind that helps people — and she just told me recently that she doesn’t have the controlled study up the sleeve of her lab coat to demonstrate this, but in her experience there is a direct correlation between how much time you spend indoors and how often you are sick — or put conversely, the more you’re outside, the healthier you are. I’d be very happy to hear from anyone who could supply the data to confirm such a claim. 

Regardless, it’s springtime. Get outside if you can. Witness the new life; things are being born again. And Easter is upon us. Our culture emphasizes Christmas, because that is the economic engine that makes our society work. But on the church calendar, Easter is the big one. The Apostle Paul said “if Christ has not been raised from the dead, then our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” 

Yeah, but Paul said some pretty strange things, right? Women don’t cut your hair, but men you’d better. He said he knows a man who was taken up to the third heaven, whatever that is. And in the same resurrection chapter of 1 Corinthians 15 I quoted from earlier, he casually tosses in a reference to the practice of being baptized for the dead.

I’m not sure what to make of those, perhaps they’re a reflection of Paul being a man of his times. Aren’t we all?! And I’m not too worried about sorting out what he meant about hair length, the 3rd heaven, or being baptized for the dead. But because BioLogos is a science-y organization we often get asked about how our scientific outlook on things fits with belief in a resurrection. Hasn’t science shown pretty conclusively that when people die, they’re dead? Isn’t the resurrection just another one of those strange things in the Bible that we moderns have to learn to get over, at least in its literal sense? Isn’t resurrection just a lovely metaphor?

Yeah, this one feels different to me. I don’t think I’m just picking and choosing which Bible verses I like and which are OK to ignore. There’s a bigger issue at stake here about the grand narrative that scripture tells, the story that I’ve committed my life to doesn’t hinge much on hair length. But the resurrection is a pretty big deal for that story. So I thought I’d reflect a bit on it, particularly with regards to the relationship between evidence and the conclusions we draw from that evidence.

That begins with a review of the evidence that is accessible to everyone, namely the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. I need to give you a little warning here, that this might be challenging for some people to hear. I said the Gospel accounts… accounts in the plural… because there are four of them, and they don’t seem to agree in all the details with each other. I think we can make sense of this, so please stick with me. But first we need to hear those accounts, and we’ve recruited some people to read them for us.

First is from Micah, son of our producer Colin, reading from The Gospel of Matthew.  

Micah:

After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

Stump:

Next, we have long time listener, Luke, reading from Mark. 

Luke:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Stump:

Here’s Kimanzi, BioLogos’ marketing specialist, reading from Luke. 

Kimanzi:

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

Stump:

Finally, Scott, another long time listener and supporter, reading from John. 

Scott:

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes. But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Stump:

Many thanks to our readers. But what are we to make of these accounts? I’d suggest that if you’re applying the kind of hermeneutic to Scripture in which you treat it as investigative journalism or a court report of some kind that is just a collection of facts, then you’re going to have to do a lot of gerrymandering to get these accounts to line up perfectly with each other. Which women came to the tomb? How many angels were there? Were the angels inside or outside the tomb? When did Jesus first appear and to whom? You can just hear a prosecuting attorney asking such questions to undermine the credibility of a witness for the defense. Mark’s account ends without presenting Jesus in resurrected form (make sure to check the footnotes in your Bible about the alternative endings of Mark and which were probably in the original). And then the Gospel of John, of course, introduces even more differences, and John makes sure everyone knows he’s the disciple whom Jesus loved and that he can run faster than Peter.

This challenges the way some of us have read Scripture all our lives. I went into some detail about this in my book, The Sacred Chain, and did a podcast episode about it a year ago (episode #168, if you’re interested). Suffice it to say here that if you’re not insisting that every detail of the text dropped from heaven, and if you heard these four accounts, you’d probably be inclined to believe that they’re all pointing pretty reliably to something. Think if you were a policeman or a reporter and heard from four different people standing on four different corners of an intersection, all claiming there was an accident, but their details didn’t completely agree: what color was the car? Which one hit the other one first? Etc. You might not be able to perfectly reconstruct the details. But… I think you’d be pretty confident that there was an accident! Something happened.

And that’s the point I’m making: I’m not basing my life on how many angels were at the tomb, or whether John could run faster than Peter. But it sure seems like something happened there at the tomb that changed the lives of those first followers, and then went on to change the course of history. Jesus’s body wasn’t in the tomb.

So how do we explain that fact today? What about the science of what we know about dead bodies? Isn’t this relevant? In the rest of this meditation, I’m going to wade in fairly deep into the philosophy of science. If that’s not exactly your cup of tea, or if you’re not too worried about whether resurrection can be squared with scientific thinking, feel free to do something else. My doctorate is in the philosophy of science, and may not be the kind that helps all people the way my kids thought doctors should be helping, but maybe it will prove useful for a few of you in at least clarifying some ideas. For people not familiar with the philosophy of science, I usually joke that scientists are the ones in white coats in brightly lit laboratories doing experiments and testing their hypotheses; philosophers of science are usually dressed in black sitting in dark rooms just thinking about what’s going on in the laboratory. Let’s see if that kind of thinking can help us here.

OK, the first thing I’ll note about science is, it is beholden to the best evidence we have at the time. Popular reporting on scientific discoveries doesn’t help here, because it is often framed as, “we used to believe X, but now we know that Y.” A more accurate headline would be, “Based on the evidence that was previously available to us, X was the best conclusion; but now more evidence has come to light and the best conclusion is Y, though we should also note that it is subject to revision should further evidence become available.” Wouldn’t that be fantastic to see as the headline for a science story in the news! I’m not holding my breath for that.

So, first lesson from the philosophy of science: scientific conclusions are based on the evidence available at the time. Political opponents might accuse scientists of flip-flopping, but that is exactly what a scientist should do if new evidence changes things.

This leads me to another misconception that people often have about how science works. We have theories that attempt to explain in general terms how things are, but not every piece of evidence always fits perfectly with that theory. There are anomalies, things that don’t quite fit the theory, and these are often the most exciting bits of science. 

One of the most famous examples of this was the discovery of the Planet Neptune. Back in the early 1800s astronomers knew about the planet Uranus, and as telescopes got better and better, they plotted its orbit more and more accurately… but something was off. It didn’t fit the predictions of where it should be according to Newton’s theory of gravity. Sometimes it was a little ahead, and sometimes it was a little behind. So what do scientists do in that case? Do they take that one bit of anomalous evidence and say, well, I guess Newton’s Law of Gravity is wrong, back to the drawing board. No, they try to figure out why this data doesn’t fit an otherwise very well confirmed theory, and that can lead to really interesting results. In this case, a couple of mathematicians got ahold of the data and analyzed it. They concluded that Newton’s laws would still explain the orbit of Uranus, if there were another pretty large mass out there in space affecting it — in other words, an undiscovered planet. They could even predict exactly where that new planet would have to be, and in 1846, astronomers pointed their telescopes at the spot, and bam — there it was, the planet Neptune. Newton’s theory of gravity was saved and the anomaly led to an important discovery.

But then… there is another episode in the history of astronomy that illustrates another way these stories can go. Also in the 19th century, the orbit of the planet Mercury was determined to be a little bit off: orbits are not perfect circles around the sun, and there is a point in them when a planet is closest to the sun — called the perihelion, and that shifts or precesses over time. You might think of a hula hoop, where the part touching your body moves around you with each swing. For Mercury it’s not quite that dramatic, the point closest to the sun moves about 16/100ths of a degree per century. That translates to 575 of what astronomers call arcseconds. Each degree is subdivided into 60 arcminutes, and each arcminute is divided into 60 arcseconds, so 575 arcseconds is a very precise measurement. The problem is that they could only account for 532 of those arcseconds using Newton’s laws of gravity. The remaining 43 arcseconds per century were baffling, anomalous evidence.

So what should we do? Just give up and say Newton was wrong? No, they learned from the discovery of Neptune and said, “what if there is another planet there somewhere that is affecting the orbit?” So they did the fancy mathematics and figured out where another planet must be to give these results; they even named that planet… ready for this… the planet Vulcan. And they pointed their telescopes at that spot (maybe hoping to zoom in and see Star Trek characters with pointy ears?)… and nothing was there. Hmm… this time the anomaly persisted. And in 1915 the perihelion of Mercury became one of the pieces of empirical evidence that helped to confirm Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which was a new way of understanding gravity. But it wasn’t so much that Newton’s theory of gravity was wrong, as that there were special circumstances when it didn’t quite apply — like when you’re as close as Mercury is to the sun, spacetime itself is warped. Einstein’s theory accounts for this and predicts exactly the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. But it is fine to keep using Newton’s law under normal circumstances, like if you’re building a rollercoaster.

OK, so what does all this have to do with the resurrection, particularly as it relates to science? Well, we have a pretty well confirmed general theory that when people die, they stay dead. There is lots of evidence for this. No one disputes that. Think of it by analogy with Newton’s law of gravity. But now from these gospel accounts, we have an anomalous piece of evidence — claims that there was a guy who died, but then he didn’t stay dead, he resurrected. What do we do with that? 

Let’s apply our two examples of planetary discoveries here. Is it like the Neptune example? That would be like saying, “our theory is absolutely correct: when people die they stay dead, and this anomalous piece of evidence must be explained away by some other facts we haven’t uncovered yet.”  

A few years ago I read through NT Wright’s massive book, The Resurrection of the Son of God for Lent. I had the opportunity to tell him that, and he didn’t think it was that funny his book was being used as a Lenten discipline, equivalent to giving up coffee or Facebook… but I wasn’t really joking. It took some serious discipline to get through the 800 pages of dense, tightly argued text. But coming out of it, I was more persuaded than ever that it is not unreasonable or irrational to believe Jesus resurrected from the dead. What Tom Wright does in that book on my planetary discovery analogy is to point his historical telescope at each of the places it has been suggested that we might find the planet Neptune in the historical record which could explain why we have this anomalous data about Jesus resurrecting. Were these resurrection accounts just wish fulfillment on the part of Jesus’s followers? Nope, they thought that dead messiahs were failed messiahs; this wasn’t the way they thought the story was going to go. Maybe Jesus didn’t really die? Maybe he was just beaten up pretty bad, but lying in the tomb awhile let him rest and recover and eventually get up and appear to some people? Nope, the Romans were pretty careful about such things. Maybe this was a big conspiracy the followers of Jesus were trying to pass off, when they themselves knew it wasn’t true? Nope. That planet Neptune isn’t there either: the followers of Jesus all died for their belief. It just doesn’t seem that there are any of those kinds of facts out there that could explain away the anomalous evidence.

Instead, I’m claiming that Jesus’s resurrection is more like the planet Vulcan episode. We have this theory — when people die they stay dead — which does pretty well at explaining the evidence… but not quite all the evidence. There are certain circumstances where it looks like the general theory doesn’t hold, just like Newton’s theory doesn’t hold in the presence of a massive body, and we need a more sophisticated theory to account for those times. It seems to me like we can say that according to the evidence we have available to us now, the best conclusion is that most of the time when people die, they stay dead, but in some extraordinary circumstances — like if you’re the Son of God — when you die, you’ll resurrect.

Summing up Lesson #2 from the philosophy of science: Anomalous evidence doesn’t have to overthrow the general usefulness of a well-confirmed theory, but it might show there are special circumstances where it doesn’t apply. 

The evidence we have talked about so far only applies to that one special instance of Jesus resurrecting. But in Paul’s great resurrection chapter, and according to the grand narrative that emerges from Scripture, it’s not just Jesus’s resurrection we’re hoping for. Or put another way, Jesus’s resurrection gives us hope that what happened to him might happen to us too. But how could that square with evidence and a scientific outlook on things?

That leads me to lesson #3 from the philosophy of science. Remember in my wonky science headline, you should also say “and this is subject to revision based on evidence we might find in the future.” There’s a tricky relationship between evidence we see in the past and what we might expect in the future. I’m of the age where I pay a little closer attention to my retirement portfolio, and almost all of the investment options come with a disclaimer: past performance does not guarantee future results, or something like that. The future doesn’t have to resemble the past, and in many ways it won’t. But shouldn’t the laws of nature remain constant across time? Yes, if we know the correct law. And here’s the rub.

There was a philosopher named Nelson Goodman who produced a famous thought experiment about this (well, famous on that relative scale of fame that philosophical thought experiments might have… which means no one but professional philosophers have heard of it). It’s called the new riddle of induction. 

Goodman said we have a very well confirmed conclusion based on all the evidence we’ve ever collected that all emeralds are green. Every bit of empirical data has confirmed this. But he said what if all emeralds are actually “grue” which he defined to mean “green before the year 2100; but blue after the year 2100.” What if that is the true description of reality? Saying emeralds are grue rather than green is based on exactly the same observations, and the conclusion follows the same logical structure. So how could we determine scientifically whether it is better to say that all emeralds are green or all emeralds are grue?

Can you appeal to scientific evidence and experience? You might say that colors of objects don’t just change, to which someone might reply, “yes they do… leaves change colors every season, skin color changes when it’s out in the sun for too long, fruit ripens, etc.” Well, the colors of emeralds don’t change… but, that’s the question. Or you might say, calling things green has worked better for us in the past, but Goodman would respond, So has grue, at least up until the cutoff date. The point of the thought experiment is that there is no non-circular reasoning that could decide between these competing hypotheses. 

The only way to sort out this conundrum is going to be by appealing to something beyond what science itself can decide.

That’s my lesson #3 from the philosophy of science: scientific conclusions rest on more than just science. There are metaphysical assumptions and values that go into deciding which theories are more plausible. It is simpler to say that emeralds are green rather than grue. But are simpler theories better? We tend to think so, but that is a value commitment, not a scientific conclusion. A philosophy of science class usually works through a bunch of these extra-scientific values or methodological principles: predictive accuracy, explanatory power, scope, falsifiability, and so on. We must acknowledge that to decide between competing theories involves more than just science.

A quick sidebar to my philosophical colleagues who are worried that I’m coming out strongly against methodological naturalism: That’s not what I’m talking about here (though that could be another interesting philosophy of science episode). I’m saying that choosing between competing theories, or even that interpreting science is not a strictly scientific enterprise.

So here’s the big take-home application of this to the resurrection. One theory says that when people die, they stay dead. Another theory says that at some point in the future, dead people will resurrect. Is one of these a better fit with the evidence we have? No, they are both based on exactly the same evidence so far. And given that there is also that anomalous piece of evidence about Jesus himself resurrecting from the dead that can’t just be explained away, we might even say that the scales are tipped in favor of the theory that claims dead people will resurrect at some point in the future. I’m pretty sure the Apostle Paul would agree.

At any rate, that is how I’m thinking about resurrection in this season of rebirth and hope. I hope it might be helpful to some of you. 

He is risen! 

Readers:

He is risen indeed!

Hoogerwerf:

Mahalo to all of the communities that were a part of this story: to Mark and Vicki for their hospitality, to First Prez community and the Wilhelms and Herb Lee for sharing their stories with us and of course for the work they are doing to build kipukas in Oahu. We hope the life and spirit we found there will find other safe places to take hold. 

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Language of God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere you can find ways to contribute at biologos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. 

Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. Thanks for listening.