Resurrection is not a simple hypothesis

Who really gets his throat cut by Occam's Razor?

Consider this horribly compressed, artifact-ridden, watermarked meme. It’s snarky but I think boils down the basic apologetic argument for the Resurrection pretty well. Something like this:

Naturalistic hypotheses explaining the origins of Christianity are strained and ad hoc, while the Resurrection hypothesis neatly accounts for all of the data. The only real reason to reject it is if you set your prior probability for the possibility of divine miracles at zero.

Intuitively it seems kinda fair. Isn’t “God raised Jesus from the dead” simpler than “grief hallucinations, uh some more hallucinations, uh, maybe tomb robbery, uh cognitive dissonance”? If we grant that miracles can happen, even with a fairly low probability doesn’t the Resurrection emerge as far and away the best explanation?

No, I don’t think so.

The proposition “God raises Jesus from the dead” is deceptively simple.

What does it mean to “be raised from the dead”?

Again, this seems pretty simple, but it really isn’t. We could rephrase the apologetic argument as “the relevant data are best explained by the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”

What are the relevant data? Mostly, the accounts found in the New Testament, in particular the gospels and Paul’s letters, in which the subjective experiences of the disciples that Jesus had been raised are reported. So once again, we can rephrase it as, “the reported subjective experience of the disciples is best explained by the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The problem here is that there exists no other instance of a bodily resurrection in all of human history. In fact it is Christian dogma that no one before Jesus was ever raised from the dead, nor will anyone be after until the Judgment Day, at which point all of this arguing will be superfluous.¹ So I can agree with a Christian that no one who isn’t Jesus has ever been raised from the dead, I just go a little further and say Jesus wasn’t, either.

If there are no other examples of bodily resurrections against which to compare that of Jesus, then how can we possibly say that the subjective experience of the disciples is best explained by a bodily resurrection? We don’t know what a bodily resurrection looks like.

How do we know Jesus was raised from the dead? Because the subjective experience of the disciples is best explained by a bodily resurrection. How do we know what a bodily resurrection entails? Because Jesus was raised from the dead.

Well, maybe even if no bodily resurrection has ever occurred, there are certain things we could say a priori about what a bodily resurrection would look like if it did happen.

Let us say that, if Jesus was bodily raised, then at one time he was alive, at a later time he wasn’t, and at a still later time he was alive again.

Simple enough, right?

Again, no.

What does it mean to be “alive”? In the case of human beings we use various criteria to discriminate between life and death. If a man is walking and talking, it’s a safe bet he isn’t dead. If a man’s heart is beating, he isn’t dead. If he’s breathing he isn’t dead.

The gospels say some interesting things about Jesus’ “resurrection body” (henceforth RB). When Jesus appears to the disciples in the “locked room,” his body still bears the marks of his crucifixion, and he famously invites “doubting Thomas” to stick his fingers into the spear-wound in his side. He sits down and eats fish with the disciples. However, when he enters the room, it is apparently by a kind of teleportation, since it was, after all, locked. Finally, Jesus floats up into the sky, ascending to Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father until he returns to judge the earth.

What can all this tell us about the RB?

Consider the holes in Jesus’ hands and feet, and the spear-wound in his side. If God has simply restored Jesus as an ordinary human being, the Resurrection wouldn’t have lasted very long, because he would have very quickly bled out again, assuming he didn’t instantly die from the shock of having a massive puncture wound through his torso.

Apparently, these wounds don’t bother Jesus at all, either by causing him pain, or by impeding his movement through the damage to tissue, bone, nerves, etc. For Jesus to feel no pain from these wounds, and for them not to hamper him at all, his bodily must be radically different from ours indeed. A normal person would not be able to take a piece of fish and eat it, nor to embrace anyone, if he’d had nails hammered through his wrists, because the nerve damage would render his hands unusable. So if Jesus can move his fingers despite the holes in his wrists, his fingers cannot be operating by the usual channel of signals from the brain and through the relevant nerves.

Likewise, someone who’s had a spear thrust through their side, up into their chest cavity, is not going anywhere, let alone walking around and sitting down to lunch. It’s been suggested the soldier’s spear pierced Jesus’ heart. If so, that’s it, game over. You die instantly. Even if it didn’t you would be unable to draw a breath as your lungs filled with blood. Depending on where exactly it struck, it would likely cause further damage to nerve and muscle that would render you unable to move. So if Jesus is moving around and eating food, clearly his body is not functioning in the matter of an ordinary human body.

So if his body moves, but not by the usual channels, how does it move? Are his nerves, his skeleton, his muscles now entirely superfluous — decorative, if you will — while some mysterious supernatural power animates his limbs?

Why isn’t Jesus gushing blood through his open wounds? Is his heart still pumping? If it is, is there some kind of invisible, supernatural seal on the wounds that redirects the blood back into the vessels when it tries to pour out? When Thomas touches the wound, does it hurt? If not, why not? Are those nerve endings still functioning? Are any of his nerve endings still functioning? Does he have nerve endings anymore? Could he feel pain, even in principle? Have the pain receptors been “shut off”? If so, can he still feel physical pleasure? A warm hug from a friend, a cool breeze on his cheek? If he can, does that mean his pleasure receptors are still in operation, or is there some entirely new mechanism by which the same subjective experience is generated?

On that note, what is Jesus’ subjective experience? Even if we admit some immaterial component to the human mind, human consciousness as we understand it is dependent on its physical substrate. Our subjective experience is thoroughly shaped by the physical stimuli we receive from the outside world and interpret through the physical bodies we inhabit. Considering the drastic alterations to consciousness that can be induced by means of physical intervention (drugs, damage, etc.) it is difficult to imagine what it would even really mean to be “conscious” apart from our physical bodies. How could we remember anything, when memory appears to be reliant on a functioning brain? How could we formulate thoughts when that likewise appears to be reliant on the brain? What would it even mean to be a human separate from his body?

And though Jesus has his RB, these questions remain unanswered, because as we have seen, his RB is utterly unlike a normal physical body in almost every respect. Does he have a functioning brain? It cannot function the way a normal brain does, unless the rest of his body is also in ordinary working order, and it doesn’t appear that could be the case. If his brain doesn’t function like an ordinary brain, what is actually happening when he says “peace be with you” to the disciples? Are the signals flowing from brain to lips? The disciples see him, but does he see them? Do his eyes still operate by taking in light? Is there, again, some completely different process that somehow still generates the exact same subjective experience of “sight” that in ordinary human beings is generated by the ordinary functioning of the eyes and brain?

What is it like to be the Risen Christ?

Paul also tells us that Jesus has been raised “incorruptible.” Presumably, he is now immune from death and decay, unlike any living being that presently exists. Is he then, still composed of carbon atoms? That seems unlikely, because if he was he would still be subject to entropy, like all other carbon-based lifeforms. So is he composed of something else? Paul perhaps believed the RB was made out of pneuma. So what is pneuma? Whatever the RB was “made” of, it could apparently be perceived by the ordinary senses of the disciples. I guess? Unless, there was, again, some entirely different process by which the subjective experience of vision and touch was generated in the minds of Peter, Thomas and the rest. Could it have been caught on film? If you turned an IR camera in the “upper room,” would Jesus show up?

How about when he floats into the air to ascend to Heaven? Any ordinary human would asphyxiate before he left earth’s atmosphere. Presumably, this didn’t happen to Jesus. Did God miraculously transmit air into his lungs? Or does he simply not need air anymore? Are his lungs, again, now purely decorative? Or does he have lungs?

And now he sits in Heaven, at the right hand of the Father. What does that mean? Most Christians do not understand God to be a physical being. So what does it even mean for Jesus’ somehow-physical body to be in some spatio-temporal location with the non-physical and timeless God, the non-physical angels, and perhaps the non-physical souls of departed Christians?² Is that even coherent?

At this point you may be saying, “This is all ridiculous nitpicking. That’s the point. Of course we can understand the Resurrection only dimly this side of Judgment Day!”

I think there’s not much a problem here if we view the Resurrection as a false belief that emerged through a mix of wishful thinking, embellishment, and a hallucination or two. None of these questions actually have answers because the early Jesus followers running around proclaiming the End of Days didn’t really think it through.

But if the Resurrection really was a real event in history, then these questions are problematic. Because if Jesus’ RB turns out to be a total black-box, utterly incomprehensible, what can we say about the nature of the Resurrection at all? Ultimately, nothing, except that it is the sort of thing that would produce a belief in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is shaped like itself.

Understood this way, the Resurrection emerges as the most ad hoc explanation of all.

“God raised Jesus from the dead.”

“Why didn’t he die again from the spear wound in his side?”

“God fixed it so that wouldn’t happen.”

“Why didn’t the holes in his wrists paralyze his fingers?”

“God fixed it so that wouldn’t happen.”

“Why didn’t he suffocate when he ascended to Heaven?”

“Well, God fixed it so that wouldn’t happen.”

The Resurrection isn’t really one big miracle, it’s countless miracles in a trench ccoat.

I think the move here would be to to argue that this isn’t ad hoc, because these aren’t disjunctive modifications introduced only to salvage the hypothesis, but rather expected on the condition that God wants to raise Jesus from the dead, so the hypothesis survives Occam’s Razor.

But I don’t think this really helps because once again, to accept the proposition “God wants to raise Jesus from the dead,” we have to establish what it even means to raise Jesus from the dead, and all of the million questions noted above spring forth again.

Naturalistic hypotheses are typically subject to unfair scrutiny. If someone suggests, for example, that Jesus’ body was stolen from the tomb, he immediately has to answer a score of questions. Who? When? Why? How? But the Christian is excused from answering those same questions as they apply to his own hypothesis, simply disposing of them all with a blanket “well, God can do what he wants.”

Imagine if, when challenged to explain the origins of the Resurrection belief, the skeptic just said, “it can be explained by naturalistic processes,” and when challenged to elaborate, he just dug his heels in: “it can by explained by whatever naturalistic processes would explain the Resurrection.”

Not very convincing.³

1. Christian orthodoxy allows for resuscitations, like those performed by Jesus in the cases of Jairus’ Daughter and Lazarus, but that is something else entirely.

2. I think the early Christians probably did not regard angels and souls as “non-physical” exactly, but most modern Christians do.

3. I think this all has a lot of implications for the argument from miracles in general, but this is long enough, so I’ll stop here from now.