If you want science to have a say on the resurrection, then you need to a) consider what Christians actually believe and b) show how science can address it through experimentation.

As for a), Christians believe Jesus was God incarnate and that his death/resurrection were a miraculous confirmation of the salvation work that took place on the cross. In other words, the theology clearly makes sense of the resurrection as a one-time event that is a promise for our resurrection at the end of history.  Nothing in Christian theology would have us predict God would continually incarnate and resurrect throughout human history.

And science cannot address the actual Christian belief, for how could you possibly test this with an experiment? For example, does the resurrection of Jesus lead us to predict lots of people would be resurrected between then and now?  If you think so, you need to make the case.  And if you cannot make the case, there is no basis for scientific investigation.

If you want science to pass judgment on the Resurrection, you need some type of scientific analysis to determine whether or not this miracle occurred.  Try it is this way.  If science is going to address a claim, science must be able to formulate that claim as a testable hypothesis.  So what is it?  If Jesus did indeed rise from the dead, what do you predict that we should be able to find in the lab or in the field?  Or fill in the blank.  If Jesus rose from the dead, then we should be able to detect ___________.

Unless someone can answer this question and fill in that blank, any attempt to argue that science contradicts the Resurrection fails.

No testable hypothesis – no science.
No science – no scientific judgment.

Perhaps that explains why there are no peer reviewed scientific studies that attempt to determine whether or not Jesus really rose from the dead.  That judgment call is not part of Science.

Since Christians have always believed the resurrection a miracle, there is no need for them to formulate a testable hypothesis.  Those who demand that Christians abandon their belief because of science need to lay their hypotheses and research results on the table.

Since I have shown that science cannot address the Resurrection and therefore cannot pass judgment on the Resurrection, all appeals to the authority of science fail here.  However, we can still fall back and at least demand the “evidence.”  We can insist there is no evidence for the Resurrection and argue, “once dead you stay dead—that’s just the way it works.”

Yet for this argument to have teeth, someone would have to make the following argument:  If Jesus did indeed rise from the dead, we would not all have the general experience of once dead, you stay dead.  If, for example, it is possible that both a)Jesus rose from the dead and b) common experience leads us to believe once dead, you stay dead can be true, then appeals to b) add nothing to the dispute.

Not only is it possible for a) and b) to both be true, that is, in essence, what we would expect if a) is true.  For Christians do not believe the Resurrection was some divine magic trick designed to impress, but instead was part of a transformative reality – Christians believe Jesus was God incarnate and that his death/resurrection were a miraculous confirmation of the salvation work that took place on the cross.

So if one is to pass judgment on the Resurrection, they must make an effort to come to terms with Christian theology.  If the evidence to support the Resurrection is supposed to amount to a negation of ‘once dead, you stay dead,’ this evidence would amount to common experience of other people rising from the dead.  For surely, if Aunt Ethel and Cousin Steve has risen from the dead, it would not be hard to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, right?

It looks to me like the modern mind has given itself two choices – either Jesus did not rise from the dead because it violates natural law and common experience, or Jesus’ resurrection did not violate natural law, as evidenced by all the other people who have risen from the dead, and thus becomes another piece of historical trivia.

Not true OR trivia strikes me as “heads I win, tails you lose.” And it certainly sidesteps Christian theology.

Of course, belief in the Resurrection does not need to be built on blind faith, for there are ways that the belief can be evaluated.  For example, the Resurrection belief is intimately tied to the notion that we are in need of salvation.  So if it could be demonstrated that human beings, and humankind, are not in need of salvation, the Resurrection belief would, IMO, be seriously undermined.  But good luck with that one.

Rosenhouse introduces Ruse’s argument as follows:

After quoting Darwin, who plainly did think that the general awfulness of nature militated against a belief in God, and after writing a bit about free will Ruse continues:

“In the case of physical evil, the dreadful earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, the traditional Christian answer, for all that Voltaire parodied it, is that of Leibniz — working by law results in good things and bad things, but overall the good outweighs the bad. God is constrained in what He does and in total He does the very best possible. Now of course there are questions about whether God had to create through law, although if He had not done so, it would be a very different world (and not arguably better) than the one we have now. For a start, He would have had to eliminate the thousands of pieces of evidence of evolution, or He would be a deceiver along the lines that Philip Gosse rather foolishly welcomed in the nineteenth century (on the grounds that God was testing our faith).”

The key point is this: “Now of course there are questions about whether God had to create through law, although if He had not done so, it would be a very different world (and not arguably better) than the one we have now.” This point is key because those who push the argument from evil almost always assume God could create our world in a way such that it retains all that we cherish (including ourselves), yet have all the evil cleanly stripped out of it.  Yet this cannot be done.  Rosenhouse’s reply fails because he has not come to this realization yet.  Watch.

Rosenhouse responds to Ruse:

I’m afraid I don’t see how this makes any sense at all. Imagine the state of the universe at some moment shortly after evolution has produced modern human beings. God, presumably, could have created the world supernaturally in a state that was identical in every morally relevant way. That world would contain free human beings embedded within a natural world adequate for their needs. Had He done so we would have been spared the millions of years of evolutionary bloodsport that has horrified everyone who has ever considered it. That universe would differ from ours only in that it would lack that awful history, which seems to me a clear improvement over the world we have. There would be no evidence of evolution to erase because evolution would never have occurred.

Let’s emphasize:

• Imagine the state of the universe at some moment shortly after evolution has produced modern human beings. God, presumably, could have created the world supernaturally in a state that was identical in every morally relevant way.

• That universe would differ from ours only in that it would lack that awful history, which seems to me a clear improvement over the world we have.

This is simply false.  If God created our world “shortly after evolution has produced modern human beings,” then for it to “differ from ours only in that it would lack that awful history,” it would have to be endowed with multiple features that made it look like the product of evolution when it was not.  This is because our world has all the features of its evolutionary past.  Even to the point where this history is recorded in our very genomes.  And our genomes are a necessary ingredient to our identities.

Think of it this way.  Imagine we could get our hands on the genomes of the modern humans that Rosenhouse envisions being created without an evolutionary past.  Would the genomes show an evolutionary relationship with primates, then mammals, then vertebrates, then chordates, etc.?  Would the genomes contain mutations, some being responsible for diseases?  Would the genomes contain pseudogenes, retrotransposons, and gobs of non-coding DNA?  If they answer if yes, then God would be the deceiver that Ruse mentions.  He would have created beings with an apparent history of an evolutionary past when none existed.  On the other hand, if God created without deception, and created human beings specially with no history of evolutionary descent, then those human beings could not be OUR ancestors.  In fact, if those humans were the founders of the human population, none of us would exist.  Because our genomes show an evolutionary relationship with primates, then mammals, then vertebrates, then chordates, etc.

So Rosenhouse is simply wrong when he insists “that universe would differ from ours only in that it would lack that awful history.”  If we rule out the notion of God as Deceiver, it would differ from ours to the great extent that none of us would exist in it.

I personally think the Noah story is pretty good also, not as an exercise in shipbuilding and navigation, but because of the bit at the end, where Noah is found drunk in the tent and his kid makes fun of him. To me, the whole story shows that simplistic solutions – let’s wipe out humankind and start again – just don’t work.

While this is very good, I think it goes deeper.

The consistent theme that runs throughout the Bible, culminates in Christian theology, and is supported by massive empirical evidence is this – we are in need of salvation.  The “simplistic solution” in that case was to wipe away evil from the Earth and, if you think about it, thus represents the response to the demand of those who pose the Argument from Evil as a challenge to God’s existence. The Noah story (and all the follows) teaches us that you cannot “poof!” evil out of human experience and humanity cannot escape evil – it is part of our nature and identity.  And we cannot save ourselves from this situation.  Those who subscribe to scientism would disagree, arguing that reason, science, and education will eventually save us.  I think their faith is a delusion.

Perhaps you can recall a time when you were out in Nature and took in a sight like the one shown below:

Notice I said “took in.”  When we see something like this, we do more than see.  We experience all of Nature as a whole.  It comes to us in its entirety and can even overwhelm us.  Yet if we so choose, we can focus on something.  Perhaps we focus on the road.  A particular mountain.  A cloud.  We see it all and see something at the same time.

Well, maybe that is how God sees us.  An entire life laid out before him.  And while God can “take it in,” He likewise can focus on any aspect of our life.  And in doing so, we might experience his presence.  In other words, God can see us as a whole, and in the moment, at the same time.

Indeed.  Well, here are two more things that can’t happen, given what we know about modern biology: a human female can’t give birth to offspring unless she is inseminated, and people who are dead for three days don’t come back to life.

It is interesting to note the sense of certainty that Coyne possesses, as if science has delivered the Absolute Truth that the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ “can’t happen.” Of course, long before modern biology was born, common experience (dogma?) have taught us that a human female can’t give birth to offspring unless she is inseminated, and people who are dead for three days don’t come back to life. Christians did not need to wait for modern biology to discover these claims about Jesus were miracle claims. They have always been acknowledged as miracles from the beginning. So it is hard to see the relevance of modern biology when it comes to this question.

More significant, however, is the manner in which Coyne contradicts himself.

Coyne rules out the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ because modern science tells us it “can’t happen.”

But then notice what Coyne, as a scientist, is willing to embrace:

And there are empirical observations of the supernatural that could convince scientists that there is a God. I discuss several of these in an article in The New Republic. One of them is the appearance and documentation of a 900-foot-tall Jesus, as was supposedly seen by Oral Roberts.

I have previously exposed the sloppy thinking entailed in this claim, but now ask yourself whether Coyne has ever paused to consider whether modern biology would allow the existence of a 900-foot-tall human? For example, the tallest dinosaur ever to exist were the Brachiosaurid group of sauropods, measuring in at about 60 feet. The tallest tree in history is Eucalyptus regnans at Mt. Baw Baw, Victoria, Australia. It is thought to have been about 470 feet tall.

From what we know about the laws of physics, and the demands of the cardiovascular, skeletal, and muscular systems, does it make sense, from a modern biological viewpoint, to posit the existence of a human that is 15 times taller than the tallest dinosaur and twice as tall as the tallest tree? I say biology says “it can’t happen.”

So Coyne is willing to embrace the existence of God because his eyes detect something that biology says “can’t happen.” He needs to see a miracle, something not explainable by science and the laws of Nature.

Yet when it comes to the miracles of the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, he rules out the truth of these claims because biology says they “can’t happen.”

Go figure.

For example, if one concludes on the basis of rational investigation that one’s character and fate are not determined by the arrangement of the planets, stars and galaxies that can be seen from Earth, then one does not waste time comparing classic tropical astrology with sidereal astrology, or either with the Sarjatak system, or any of the three with any other construction placed on the ancient ignorances of our forefathers about the real nature of the heavenly bodies.

Of course, such arrogance comes at a price and that price can be the flaunting of one’s ignorance. For example, Lawrence Krauss kicked off his WSJ defense of New Atheism with a quote that both Coyne and Myers embraced with glee:

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. – JBS Haldane

Yet the Haldane quote demonstrates profound theological ignorance.

Haldane’s point is valid only for theists who embrace a trickster god who is constantly trying to cause problems for us mortals (do such theists really exist?). The Christian conception of God is that of a Law-Giver, a God who creates an orderly universe where actions have predictable consequences. So deeply ingrained is this understanding of God that some Christians in the past have rejected quantum physics because they think it contradicts the lawful order of creation.

Haldane, and those like him, take a rather childish view on miracles, thinking that if someone accepts a miracle, they are obligated to be on the constant lookout for miracles in everyday life. Yet in reality, miracles only make theological sense against the backdrop of an orderly, law-like reality. This is because miracles are not whimsical displays of divine power, but signs that signify a deeper reality. For example, the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus were one-time events because they were associated with the singularity of the Incarnation. Since God does not incarnate on a regular basis, there is no reason to expect these miracles to repeat. What’s more, if God was constantly interfering with the laws of Nature such that Haldane could never do an experiment, the miracles of the virgin birth and resurrection would hardly stand out amid all the constant miraculous noise.

Because of their theological ignorance, scientists like Haldane, Krauss, Coyne, and Myers actually believe that evidence against a trickster god is evidence against the Christian God. They seem to believe that if God exists, there would be no laws of Nature and science could not exist.

There is also another serious problem with Haldane’s argument that has nothing do with theology. In this case, we have to wonder why Haldane is cherry-picking, as there are many attributes of the scientific approach that are important.

For example, what scientist would disagree with the following change to the first sentence of his quote?

My practice as a scientist is to be objective.

Anyone? Anyone?

Okay, so let’s follow through on Haldane’s logic:

My practice as a scientist is to be objective. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also objective in the affairs of the world.

What this means is that if we were to read the various blogs, magazine, and newspaper writings of various scientists, and found them to be biased in regard to “the affairs of the world,” Haldane’s logic would have us declare these scientists are intellectually dishonest. Are the New Atheists truly willing to expand all aspects of the scientific approach into all of their lives? Or has religion been singled out for special reason?

It could never be a scientific finding that a miracle occurred, for science is the attempt to understand reality in terms of the laws of nature. To say that a miracle occurred is to abandon the scientific (= naturalistic) perspective on the matter. If a scientist were to end up with such a belief, then it would be incompatible with the scientific point of view. It would be as if to say, “Here is something that could never be naturalistically explained and so it lies outside the domain of science.”

Another way to think of a miracle is that it represents a Gap – something that cannot be explained by natural laws.

In essence, it would represent a gap in our scientific knowledge. That Coyne is ready to embrace belief in God because of a gap, some phenomenon that could not be explained by science – a nine-hundred-foot-tall-Jesus or the sudden appearance of Jesus’s head on Mt. Rushmore – shows that he is advocating the “god-of-the-gaps” approach. And anyone familiar with science knows that the “god-of-the-gaps” approach has no place in science. Things that cannot be explained by science are not part of science.

So Coyne’s willingness to include miracles/gaps in science runs contrary to mainstream views of science. What’s more, it runs into two major problems:

1. Coyne speaks of “documenting” these miracles. Yet with many of his examples, he fails to explain HOW science would go about documenting a miracle and reaching the conclusion that a miracle truly occurred.

2. Coyne doesn’t seem to understand “documenting” something doesn’t really capture the essence of science. Science is concerned with explaining phenomena in terms of cause-and-effect, where the cause of one effect can be the effect of another cause. Science is thus focused on how things work and how things came into existence – a focus on mechanisms. If Coyne introduces gaps into science, he has radically redefined science such that the focus on explanation and mechanism has been suspended. Furthermore, a scientist would want to understand the mechanism behind the miracle – how did that face of Jesus materialize on Mt. Rushmore. If the cause is supernatural, how could scientists, trained to use natural laws to derive explanations, ever hope to probe the mechanism of this miracle?

In the end, Coyne’s argument about incorporating the supernatural into science is a train wreck. This should not be a surprise given that Coyne never bothered to define “science” and “supernatural,” has never published a single scientific study that addresses a supernatural cause, and shifts the focus from “science” to the observations/beliefs of scientists.

At this point, Drange says something that is quite pertinent

Scientists can claim that miracles occur, but when they do so, they do so only as laypersons, not as scientists.

Coyne is free to embrace a miracle as a person, but when doing so, despite the fact that he is a scientist, science is not incorporating the miracle.

A miracle does not need to be documented by science or incorporated into science to have happened.

Actually, Giberson has a better handle on science that does Coyne. Lets’s imagine that we wake up tomorrow, turn on the TV, and find reporters from all over the world excitedly showing pictures of Mt. Rushmore which now has a fifth head that appeared sometime during the night – the face of Jesus with God’s name signed underneath. Millions of Christians would see this as a sign from God and when Coyne himself traveled to see it in person, he would fall on his knees.

But what about the role of science?

Remember that Coyne has never defined “science” and has shifted the focus from science to the perspectives of those who happen to be scientists. So consider which of the following sentences would best describe this embrace of God belief in relation to science:

A. We have found something that science cannot explain - a miracle.

B. Science has determined that God made the face on the mountain.

I think it obvious that most people would adopt position A and view the face of Jesus on Mount Rushmore with God’s name signed underneath as a sign from God precisely because science could not account for it. If anyone would favor position B, their burden is to outline how science determined God made the face on the mountain.

Coyne also adds:

There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.”

At this point you should notice the pattern: nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus, a spontaneous appearance of Jesus’s face on Mt. Rushmore, people being healed of blindness and raised from the dead, etc. Coyne is thus willing to redefine science to include supernatural causation if only he can witness a MIRACLE. Coyne believes science can incorporate miracles as long as science can somehow “document” their occurrence.

In other words, Coyne is like this scientist in the cartoon:

As long as he is personally convinced of the miracle, and the miracle explains something science cannot explain, Coyne feels no need to be more explicit and includes it in science.

So, to make the case that science can incorporate supernatural causation, it turns out that Coyne is arguing that scientists who witness miracles can include such miracles in their science. The only problem, says Coyne, is that no clear miracles have been documented.

Since Coyne believes that, in principle, miracles have a place in science, I’m not sure he realizes just how far out on a limb he is. Let’s see what happens next.

A meaningful effort to reconcile science and faith must start by recognizing them as they are actually understood and practiced by human beings. You cannot re-define science so that it includes the supernatural, as Kansas’s board of education did in 2005. Nor can you take “religion” to be the philosophy of liberal theologians, which, frowning on a personal God, is often just a hairsbreadth away from pantheism. (emphasis added)

If we cannot “re-define science” to include the supernatural, it stands to reason that there is indeed an a priori philosophical commitment to materialistic explanations. It does not bode well for Coyne’s case if such a fundamental contradiction is laid out in the very same essay.

So we have two claims from Coyne:

Claim 1: You cannot re-define science so that it includes the supernatural

Claim 2: Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment.

To support Claim 2, Coyne reaches back over a century to insist that God was once part of science, but the “God did it” explanation “has never advanced our understanding of nature an iota, and that is why we abandoned it.” For some strange reason, the fact that our Universe runs as an orderly and rational place, where a striking balance of natural law and contingency allows us to live as free agents in a coherent world, is supposed to be evidence against the existence of God. But that’s another topic for another day. What I would note here is that while Coyne presents a questionable representation of the history of science, what he fails to realize is that even if his point is valid, it is not all that relevant. Yes, scientists in the 19^th century may have mixed their theology and science, but that does not mean that scientists in 2009 do not rely on an a priori philosophical commitment to materialistic explanations.

Consider, for example, the words of another scientist, Richard Lewontin:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

So Lewontin would disagree with Coyne and we are now left wondering who is right, who speaks for the scientific community, and how would we know? At this point, we should begin to think like scientists and ponder the extent to which this disagreement exists. How many scientists agree with Lewontin and Coyne’s Claim 1, insisting that science restrict itself to a commitment to materialistic explanations? And how many would agree with Coyne’s claim 2, that science is open to supernatural causes (for example, scientists witnessing a nine-hundred-foot-tall-Jesus)?

In other words, we cannot accept Coyne’s claim on faith. He may be a very bright scientist, but he is, in the end, only one scientist. If we are to make claims about “scientists” or “science,” we need sociological data that explore the beliefs of a community of scientists. And I must confess that I know of no such studies.

We could, however, consider Jerry Coyne himself. Is it psychologically plausible that he remains open to supernatural causation in science? He is, after all, a member of the New Atheist Movement who regularly lashes out at theistic evolutionists who hold rather meek theistic views in relation to science. And he did claim that we “cannot re-define science so that it includes the supernatural.” If Coyne does not hold to an a priori philosophical commitment to materialistic explanations, it is hard to imagine what  such a commitment would look like!

But let’s not forget that Coyne has gone on record by providing an example of what it would take for him to incorporate the supernatural into science:

if a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus appeared to the residents of New York City, as he supposedly did to the evangelist Oral Roberts in Oklahoma, and this apparition were convincingly documented, most scientists would fall on their knees with hosannas.

Next, we need to consider what Jerry Coyne is saying about science given he would include this type of phenomenon into the realm of science.

So how is it that the “supernatural phenomena” (whatever that is supposed to be) falls into the realm of science? Coyne provides an example:

if a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus appeared to the residents of New York City, as he supposedly did to the evangelist Oral Roberts in Oklahoma, and this apparition were convincingly documented, most scientists would fall on their knees with hosannas.

That’s it?! That’s it. So we are supposed to believe that science can determine whether or not God exists because “a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus” would cause Coyne and his colleagues to “fall on their knees with hosannas.” Is this how science works? Why is Coyne’s observation of a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus supposed to be science?

As I explained in the previous message, making an observation does not qualify as science. If Jerry Coyne observed a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus, it might indeed have a great impact on Jerry Coyne, but we could not say from his observation that “science has detected the existence of Jesus.”

Ah, but maybe the science comes in at this point – “and this apparition were convincingly documented.” If so, Coyne provides no clue as to how science is supposed to document an apparition of a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus. Let’s say a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus appeared to the residents of New York City on June 19, 2009. How would science document this? By taking testimony from witnesses? You mean, like interviewing people who have seen UFOs? That’s not science.

Perhaps science can convincingly document the apparition by gathering photographs. You mean, like photos of UFOs? That’s not science.

But let’s say that the National Enquirer has a picture of the nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus and it convinces Coyne and his colleagues to fall on their knees with hosannas. Does this mean the National Enquirer is now part of the scientific community? And one also has to wonder why Coyne and his colleagues are so quick to fall on their knees. How did they use science to determine the nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus was really Jesus? How did they rule out the possibility that some intergalactic alien youths were playing a practical joke on the people in New York?

So while Coyne tells us that supernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science, his leading example completely fails to support his claim. Observing a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus does not qualify as science for the simple reason that any observation, by itself, is not science. And when it came to convincingly documenting the apparition, Coyne does not provide a single clue as to how science would do this.