Let me begin with an apology for being away from this forum for so long. I’ve attempted to atone for my absence by composing a post whose central argument may be of interest to Christian apologists such as Mike Licona or James Tour, although I’m sure they have far better things to do than read anything I’ve written. Anyway, I’ve been watching a lot of online debates on the resurrection of Jesus recently, and it struck me that the most powerful objection that a non-Christian could make to belief in the resurrection of Jesus is that the Resurrection Hypothesis that purports to explain the agreed-on facts is too vague to count as a hypothesis, and therefore doesn’t even get to first base. Please allow me to explain.
It simply won’t do to define the Resurrection Hypothesis by the statement, “God raised Jesus’ dead body back to life on Easter Sunday morning, making it glorious and imperishable without losing its physicality, and He then allowed this risen body to vacate Jesus’ tomb and manifest itself to Jesus’ disciples.” The reason why I find such a statement unacceptably vague is that it fails to define what a body is, what Jesus’ being dead meant, what being physical means, and what being imperishable means. Put simply, there are certain philosophical questions that need to be answered, and that the Resurrection Hypothesis - at least, the version defended by apologists - refuses to address.
Let’s start with the notion of a body. What does it mean to be a body? It appears to me that the Resurrection Hypothesis defines a body anthropocentrically and phenomenologically, as something that can be seen, heard, touched, smelt or tasted by human beings. This is very different from the definition used by scientists, which is roughly as follows: something whose characteristics can be described by the laws of nature, which are mathematical in form. The idea here is that even if the fundamental characteristics of bodies, such as mass and charge, turn out to be ultimately ineluctable, they can still be descibed systematically (in relation to other bodies) and mathematically.
Christian apologists don’t like the scientific definition of a body because it opens up a theological can of worms. Specifically, was Jesus’ risen body subject to the laws of nature that hold in our universe or not? If it was, then it couldn’t have been imperishable: any body within our universe is subject to forces that can pull it apart. Even black holes can evaporate. But if Jesus’ body wasn’t subject to the laws of nature, then how could Jesus’ disciples have interacted with it - for instance, by touching it and even reaching inside it, as doubting Thomas was invited to do by Jesus? And how could it have assimilated food such as fish if the laws of nature, which define how bodies in our universe interact, held no sway over it? (Some readers will have noticed by now that I’m raising questions that have previously been raised by other authors, such as Fr. Gerald O’Collins and the philosophers Cavin and Colombetti.)
The question of whether Jesus’ risen body was subject to the laws of nature becomes particularly acute when we consider Emmy Noether’s First Theorem. The basic idea, as I understand it, is that the conservation laws which hold in our cosmos are a natural entailment of the cosmos possessing certain kinds of symmetry. That being the case, the conservation laws cannot fail to hold without the symmetries that define our universe being broken. This matters for the resurrection of Jesus, because Jesus’ risen body was supposedly capable of dematerialising (as when Jesus vanished before his disciples’ very eyes) and even exiting the cosmos altogether (as occurred at the Ascension). One could suggest that God instantly created an equivalent amount of matter to compensate for the departure of Jesus’ risen body from our cosmos and thereby prevented any conservation laws from being violated, but that would be very ad hoc.
Again, the term “body” when used by scientists denotes something with a location in space and time, even if the location may turn out to be somewhat fuzzy under certain circumstances (the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). But at times, it seems that Jesus’ risen body didn’t have a physical location at all - for example, when it dematerialised. Did it cease to be a body then? If not, why not?
Let’s now turn to the notion of Jesus being dead. What does this mean, exactly? Modern medicine defines death in terms of loss of brain function. But once the brain ceases to function, decay inevitably sets in, as cells starved of their regular supply of oxygen start to break down. (Preservation in ice can delay this process, but as far as I’m aware, the longest recorded period after which a dead person who’d fallen into an icy pond was capable of being brought back to life was 147 minutes or so.) The problem here should be readily apparent to anyone who has ever read Psalm 16:10, a verse that the early Christians frequently applied to Jesus: “You will not let your beloved know decay.” Jesus’ dead, crucified body is not supposed to have undergone decay of any kind - even the decay of its brain cells. But if it did not undergo decay, then did it really die? Is a brain that’s being supernaturally oxygenated by God for one-and-a-half days while lying in a tomb really dead, or in a state of suspended animation?
Let’s now examine the notion of physicality. Resurrection apologists typically maintain that the risen Jesus did not possess an astral body, like that of a phantasm, but a tangible one made of flesh and bone - and, one presumes, blood as well, or otherwise, the Christian practice of receiving the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist would make no sense whatsoever. This risen body must also contain a beating heart, if it has its own supply of blood. But the whole purpose of blood circulation is to deliver oxygen and nutrients to cells which would rapidly die if they did not regularly receive these vital substances. In an imperishable body, however, blood circulation would serve no purpose. Nor would the process of digestion, which supposedly enabled the risen Jesus to eat a piece of fish in front of his astonished disciples. There is an old philosophical and theological axiom that God does nothing in vain. However, it would seem that a naturally imperishable body which still functions like ours is one whose systems do indeed function in vain, as they are not required to protect that body from death or degeneration. Which leads one to ask: why does a resurrected body need to be made of flesh, anyway?
Finally, let’s look at the notion of imperishability. A resurrected body is supposed to be indestructible and impervious to suffering paIn or injury. For this to hold true, it must be subject to different laws of physics - presumably, in a cosmos that lies beyond our own. All well and good, but how can such a body be numerically identical with the body of someone like Jesus who died in our cosmos, which is governed by a different set of laws? For identity to hold, there must be a physical connection between our cosmos and the other one. This is problematic enough in itself: what set of laws governs the connection? A more fundamental criticism, however, is that the idea of a resurrection has now been recast as an extreme form of teleportation (from one universe into another), leaving room for an ascension, but no room for apparitions of the risen Jesus. Here’s the thing. If objects in our cosmos can causally interact with objects in another cosmos, then they must have a whole extra set of properties enabling them to do so, which is metaphysically messy in the extreme: objects in our cosmos have a host of hitherto-unsuspected physical properties by virtue of which they are related to objects in another cosmos as well. At this point, pbysicists will protest that the laws of our cosmos, by definition, are supposed to be capable of exhaustively describing the properties of the bodies it contains. And it matters not one whit whether we view the ultimate constituents of reality as what we call bodies or as their underlying quantum fields; all that matters here is that a cosmos has to fully encompass the properties of the things it contains, or it is not a cosmos, but merely a region. In the Greco-Roman world of the first century, many educated people did indeed believe that objects in the sublunar region were subject to decay, while heavenly bodies were impervious to destruction. Today, we realise that the laws of nature do not vary according to location, which means that if there are any indestructible bodies, they must lie in a completely different realm. For somone who perished through crucifixion to acquire an imperishable body, merely flying to the stars won’t work. A metaphysical transformation must take place, but it must be one which at the same time preserves an individual’s identity. How? Don’t ask me.
The point of my post is not to discredit the religious concept of a resurrection, but to show that when we use this term, we really don’t have a clear idea of what we are talking about. Indeed, the very notion of someone who is dead being resurrected to everlasting life raises so many objections on both a physical and a metaphysical level that a sceptic might reasonably ask whether the Resurrection Hypothesis is a coherent one, capable of doing any explanatory work at all. And the only honest answer that we, as Christians, can give is: we are in no position to know, on this side of eternity, whether the concept of a physical resurrection makes any objective sense. Which is why the whole enterprise of arguing for the Resurrection as the best explanation of the known facts is pure folly. All we can do is believe and hope in the One whom the disciples believed in long ago, hoping that we will one day understand clearly. Although we cannot argue for the Resurrection, we can reasonably hope and believe that it is true, while rejecting the dogmatism of materialists who stoutly aver that it cannot be. The mathematical biologist J.B.S. Haldane was no friend of religion and took a dim view of personal immortality, but he was modest enough to declare in his essay, “Possible Worlds”: “Now, my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” In an epilogue to his essay, “The Last Judgment”, he added, “I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine.” If the universe is governed by a God of surprises, then the resurrection of Jesus may have been the first of many that He has in store for us.
