Part 4: On the Plausibility of Resurrection 

Resurrections don’t happen everyday—that much is obvious. So how should we come to believe in one? Well that depends in part on how plausible or how probable one thinks a resurrection might be. The word ‘plausible’ colloquially means how reasonable something is—but this is still pretty vague. Here we’ll use it with a more specific meaning; we finds something plausible when it fits with our background beliefs. So if you think we humans are alone in the universe, you’ll find aliens an implausible explanation for UFO’s (or UAP’s if we’re trying to keep up with the acronym Jones’ ). If, however, you believe that you’ve been kidnapped by Martians then you’ll probably find aliens to be a perfectly plausible explanation for UFO’s.

Plausibility is usually used in an qualitative way. When we try to apply quantitative reasoning we wind up talking about probabilities. The quantitative parallel to plausibility would be prior probability. It is the odds of something being true before (prior to) looking at the current data set in question. So if you think it is very unlikely that aliens exist prior to looking at UFO sightings, this means its highly unlikely that aliens are responsible for UFO’s and you’ll need a lot of evidence to change your mind.

A Humean Objection

So how are we to decide what to believe? A Humean response is to say that our beliefs should be ordered according their probabilities. and consequently if something is highly improbable we shouldn’t believe it happened. Since a resurrection is extraordinarily improbable, we shouldn’t believe it happened.

While prima facie reasonable, this view immediately runs into problems. The biggest one is that it’s not truth-conducive; it’s not aimed at the finding the truth. Suppose, for instance, that a resurrection did happen. Even if one (or a few) resurrections happened they’d be wildly unlikely. Since the Humean position goes with the probabilities, it tells us to not believe the resurrection—even if it did happen! If our goal is to find the truth, the Humean position cannot work, it tells us not to believe improbable things even if they are true.

The Possibility of Resurrection

Since the Humean shortcut doesn’t work, there’s no way around making a plausibility assessment. How then do we assess the resurrection? A straightforward answer is to say that resurrections are impossible and consequently any resurrection theory will be wildly implausible. The problem here is the difficulty in showing that resurrections are impossible. Simply because there are many cases of dead people staying dead this does not entail that every person who dies will stay dead. This is the classic problem of induction. How do we move from the A-type things observed so far have property B to every A-type thing has property B?

There are really only two options. The first is exhaustive enumeration—we can confidently say every A type thing has property B if we examine all A type things and find they have property B. But this is clearly impossible for resurrections. We have no where near the exhaustive knowledge needed to make such a claim. There are millions of people whose lives and deaths haven’t been observed and recorded so there’s no way to say we’ve observed that every person who died stayed dead.

The other option is to infer that there is something about the nature and situation of A-type things that make it necessary for them to exhibit property B. This is the type of argument you’ll typically hear—but it depends on many many background conditions. For instance simply because people on their own die and stay dead does not entail that there is nothing in the universe that could bring that person back to life. In fact, if God exists, then it appears that there is something with the power to resurrect people whenever he wants, and so you can never entirely rule out a resurrection. Similarly, there’s always a chance that there’s some alien race, far advanced beyond us that can bring people back from the dead. Only if one can definitively rule out every such possibility could you confidently say that resurrections never happen, can’t happen.

Miracles as Signs

Something else to consider is the nature of miracles themselves. The full Christian explanation of the historical data, the empty tomb, the disciples belief, the conversion of skeptics, etc. is that Jesus rose from the dead. However, this immediately raises a question, “Crickey, that’s weird! How did that happen?” The answer to the second question is God; he raised Jesus from the dead.

When I ask atheists what would persuade them that God exists, I get two main answers. The first is: nothing—there’s no evidence that would change their mind. Another less belligerent more reasonable answer is something like, “If God wrote on the sky that he exists, I would believe.” This is, in effect, an appeal to the miraculous to authenticate God’s existence or message.

Consider God’s communication with man from his perspective. If God wanted to communicate with man, and wanted them to be able to distinguish between what he says and what mere humans say, what can he do? One option is to appeal to the awesomeness of the content of the revelation itself—something like, this text is so beautiful, its sentiments so elevated, it’s just so flippin’ cool that God must have done it! And while there is something to be said for that position—it is extremely subjective. One person sees elevated morality, the next sees brutality, one sees an elegant story, the next a boring trite tale.

A safer option is for God to accompany a message with a mark, a sign it is from him. What kind of sign could that be? Well, it’d have to be a sign that regular humans would not make, a sign that is supernatural, a sign that is highly unlikely for humans to be able to replicate. All of this is to say, if we require miracles to authenticate God’s message, but we require us to accept only that which is intrinsically probable, we have made it impossible for us to recognize God’s message, even if he has spoken. Consequently, we would have to remain open to the possibility of a miracle if we want to remain open to authenticated divine communication.

This leaves us in a place where we cannot rule resurrections out beforehand, but where we should still accept resurrections as generally implausible or improbable. Yes, our beliefs should change based on the evidence to hand. But, if some theory is wildly improbable to begin with then it would take a lot of evidence to make that theory more probable than not. This seems quite fair. In fact, it is something that the Christian position accepts.

In this sense, the most common objection to resurrection is the most bemusing from the Christian point of view. There is some grand irony of trying to disprove the Christian position by arguing that resurrections don’t normally happen. But the Christian position requires accepting this very point! There is no disagreement between the skeptic and the Christian there. Christians find in the resurrection the ultimate miracle and sign of God’s action, which requires it to be different and enormously improbable — apart from God’s action. It would be useless as a sign otherwise.

But it is not only this. Core to Christian theology is that Jesus came to deal with death. Jesus came to solve a problem, the problem that all men sin, and that consequently all men die. The remedy to this is for Jesus to come, accept the other’s sin, die for them, but then be made alive again so that others can be made alive through him. None of Christian theology makes sense if people everywhere don’t die and stay dead. Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection would be rendered utterly useless if people popped back up from the grave all the time.

The Puzzle

This leaves us with an interesting puzzle. Both the skeptic and the Christian appeal to the same improbability of resurrections as part of their theories. But obviously, such improbability makes it hard to believe in Jesus’ resurrection. However, as we’ve seen, Jesus’ resurrection better accounts for the local historical data. How do we cut through the impasse?  

Find the next post here.