Easter and Resurrection

I would be amiss if I didn't have a post about Easter. Besides, what else would I post about today except for what I know?

Modern people have a problem with resurrection. Many people I know have adopted a very scientistic worldview and consider scientific discovery as the omnicompetent institution of our time. Celebrating the resurrection for them amounts to no more than going through the motions and having egg hunts. But there are things that science can't even begin to touch-- things that cannot be put into a test tube. No one can ever bottle up a thought. No one can put feelings in a can and subject them to a catalyst. And no one will ever be able to do that. I know people have said that about things before until science made the appropriate discoveries. And I think that's wonderful!! But we know for a fact that no one will be able to fully understand causation of a thought. We could say that thoughts emerge from the chemical impulses of the brain. But the term emerge isn't a causal term. It's descriptive. There are depths to everyday reality of which science will never be able to determine causality-- consciousness, love, honesty (to name a few).

But what about the resurrection of Jesus? Shouldn't we be studying the biological sciences on that? In short, no. It isn't a scientific question. It's a historical one. Huston Smith wrote recently that modernism made a fatal mistake. It equated absence-of-evidence with evidence-of-absence, and if you think about it for a moment the two are not the same. How many times have we heard people say, "There isn't any evidence!"? Well, of course there isn't. Why would we expect it in the first place? And it doesn't mean that, therefore, it didn't happen. I would say that it's because of a worldview that has been adopted-- a worldview that says that matter is all there is. Anything that isn't matter is derived from matter. But where's the proof of that? Is love merely a learned response? Are thoughts the result of electrical impulse? It would seem that way, but truth is stranger than fiction. You can stick probes in a skull and measure the amplitude of the brainwaves as the person reacts to stimulii. But if you want to know what the person is thinking, you have to ask them. There's no other way.

Keith Ward presents the argument that we have everything backward. We figure causation from the bottom up, when in reality causation is from the top down. This is the Christian worldview. It presents a more thorough picture of human experience. And in that experience we could, historically speaking, say that Jesus rose from the dead. We have accounts of an empty tomb and appearances of Jesus. For the many ways the resurrection accounts are different, all four of them have those two aspects in common. People saw an empty tomb. People saw Jesus. The task of our day is work out the implications of that resurrection by asking, "If I don't believe it happened, what would be the difference if it really did happen as an actual historical event?" Those with a scientistic worldview should ask themselves that question. They might be surprised by their answers.