Jesus is Like (But Not Like) Others

This is an important point, and one that suggests that @Faizal_Ali, apart from not really having done any homework on the scholarship of this subject, is also hazy on the philosophy both of history and science.

Science since around 1880 has restricted itself methodologically to “natural” causes and effects (a different situation from, say, Bacon’s time when in theory providential divine acts might be studied by science, or Maxwell’s time when mentioning God’s works in scientific discourse was not problematic). Therefore, as you rightly indicate, science cannot say that a miracle is impossible, but only that it is impossible to deal with under the arbitrarily chosen methodology scientists use. This is (a) because the supernatural has been excluded from the field of study a priori, and (b) that it is simply incoherent to use a study of natural causation for supernatural causation.

The corollary is that there are many scientists thoroughly convinced that the resurrection happened, and that the biblical documents are truthful records, who (accepting their discipline’s methodological constrictions) agree that the resurrection is not amenable to scientific corroboration. For the same reason it is not demonstrable by cookery or by the rules of football: the wrong tools for the job.

The whole subject of methodological naturalism has, of course, been extensively discussed here at PS, but for our purposes it is a sociological given. One advantage that has been pointed out is that it enables the same science to be done by both believers and unbelievers - but that should not fool us into denying that both will draw metaphysical conclusions according to their convictions based on other, non-scientific grounds. This is philosophy of science 101.

Likewise, for a century or more, the discipline of modern historiography has arbitrarily decided that its business is to investigate the human and material causes and effects of events in the past - whether because of science-envy, or some other reason, methodological naturalism is part of the academic methodology of history. It has been decided, by historians, not by the events themselves, that the supernatural is not the proper subject matter of academic history.

In other words, history nowadays is not “gathering evidence for what happened in the past,” but “applying naturalistic tools to explain what happened in the past.”

This was not always so - in Roman times, for example, the key element was witness testimony no more than one or two points removed from events. A decent historian was there himself, or spoke to a credible witness, or at worst spoke to a reliable source who interviewed a witness. If one or more credible witnesses reported that a wondrous sign took place, you recorded it (not least because no historian then doubted that supernatural events do occur). If the story was doubtful, you also recorded that fact (eg “It is said that…”).

So by the very fact of doing academic history, good modern scholars cannot come to supernatural conclusions about events, and they can only point to the events leading up to, and following, what original sources record as supernatural. They can investigate the possibility of non-supernatural causes (instead of or as well as supernatural - a “natural” storm that brings unexpected victory in a battle might also be providential - the historian cannot arbitrate on that).

And they can (as, I think, a majority do in the case of the resurrection) conclude that none of these alternative explanations is really sufficient, at which point the most they may do as historians is remind readers that, like science, their discipline is simply incompetent to judge supernatural events, which by no means excludes them from “history” in the sense of “events.”

The person seeking the truth of the resurrection must therefore use science and history only to explore the background, at which point the individual must go beyond academia and ask, as a Roman historian would, “Is this witness to God’s action (in this case the New Testament) credible in the light of the events that I can demonstrate to be true?”

After a century or so of hyperskepticism (based largely on not recognising the limits of academic metaphysical assumptions), it is true to say that the last 50 years or so has been one in which thorough historical investigation has made a positive conclusion increasingly easy to draw, whilst alternative explanations from theft of the body to mythicism have failed to hold up.

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