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Miracles and science
May. 17th, 2009 11:28 pmIn my monthly group of liberal Catholics, we've been listening to two lectures by the retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong. I agree with a lot of his positions: I agree that the view of Christ's death as a human sacrifice is problematic and outdated (what keeps God from simply forgiving us? why is he required to have a sacrifice?), and I am intrigued by his theological adoption of Darwinism: rather than seeing human beings as "fallen", he views us as incomplete, but growing towards our full potential.
Reading the Wikipedia page, however, I see that he is particularly anti-miracle and especially anti-Resurrection. Both violate physical law, and therefore neither could have happened, he says. He's not alone or new in thinking so; Thomas Jefferson for one wrote his own translation of the Gospels in which he removed everything supernatural.
He's perfectly free to believe this, but I don't find his argument justified, based on my perception about science. As I may have written about before (and if not, you can find my thoughts in detail on Street Prophets), science is about predictability and consistency, not truth (or TRVTH, if you like). Evolution is a great example: scientists embrace evolution primarily because it has great predictive power. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant. If God created the world 6000 years or 6 minutes ago, but in such a way that it behaves as if it is much older, then science will not be able to tell the difference unless God made a mistake. But if the world behaves as if evolution works, then evolution is a perfectly useful tool, and whether it is "true" or "false" is a matter for philosophers, not scientists. (Some scientists are philosophers as well, of course, and some people have developed a notion of TRVTH based on science, but that itself is not science.)
So let's get to the case of Jesus. Suppose you believe that Jesus is God made man, and that his incarnation was a singular event in the history of the world. In particular, Jesus' resurrection (if it occurred) would have been a unique occurrence, the only time in the history of the world that God incarnate recovered from death. As a unique event, science does not and CAN not say anything about this. What does predictability have to do with something that never occurred before and will never occur again? Nothing. There is no model to construct here, nothing to measure.
Of course the Resurrection violates our notions of physical law-- heck, they violated the Jews' notions of physical law 2000 years ago-- but for someone like myself, who is a Christian and a scientist, that's the WHOLE POINT. Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time but also a very thoughtful writer of Christian theology, said that the important thing about the Incarnation was its specificity: God became part of history, not in some nebulous omnipresent way, but in the form of a specific person, in a specific location, with a specific upbringing and a specific gender and race and culture. The Incarnation was a very specific, one-of-a-kind event. If God decided to bend or break the rules for this one-time event, even to the point of reversing death, how would we as scientists know? What test can we do to prove that this didn't happen? Line up a bunch of incarnate deity corpses and show that they never regain life? As I mentioned, we can't even prove that the world existed last Tuesday.
Now of course, one may find the Resurrection or the other miracles in the Gospels or the Bible to be highly unlikely, given that such things don't happen now. That's a reasonable belief, and I would never imagine that I could dissuade someone like Spong from such a belief, certainly not with the argument above. But it is a *belief*, something arising from philosophy. It is not science.
Reading the Wikipedia page, however, I see that he is particularly anti-miracle and especially anti-Resurrection. Both violate physical law, and therefore neither could have happened, he says. He's not alone or new in thinking so; Thomas Jefferson for one wrote his own translation of the Gospels in which he removed everything supernatural.
He's perfectly free to believe this, but I don't find his argument justified, based on my perception about science. As I may have written about before (and if not, you can find my thoughts in detail on Street Prophets), science is about predictability and consistency, not truth (or TRVTH, if you like). Evolution is a great example: scientists embrace evolution primarily because it has great predictive power. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant. If God created the world 6000 years or 6 minutes ago, but in such a way that it behaves as if it is much older, then science will not be able to tell the difference unless God made a mistake. But if the world behaves as if evolution works, then evolution is a perfectly useful tool, and whether it is "true" or "false" is a matter for philosophers, not scientists. (Some scientists are philosophers as well, of course, and some people have developed a notion of TRVTH based on science, but that itself is not science.)
So let's get to the case of Jesus. Suppose you believe that Jesus is God made man, and that his incarnation was a singular event in the history of the world. In particular, Jesus' resurrection (if it occurred) would have been a unique occurrence, the only time in the history of the world that God incarnate recovered from death. As a unique event, science does not and CAN not say anything about this. What does predictability have to do with something that never occurred before and will never occur again? Nothing. There is no model to construct here, nothing to measure.
Of course the Resurrection violates our notions of physical law-- heck, they violated the Jews' notions of physical law 2000 years ago-- but for someone like myself, who is a Christian and a scientist, that's the WHOLE POINT. Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time but also a very thoughtful writer of Christian theology, said that the important thing about the Incarnation was its specificity: God became part of history, not in some nebulous omnipresent way, but in the form of a specific person, in a specific location, with a specific upbringing and a specific gender and race and culture. The Incarnation was a very specific, one-of-a-kind event. If God decided to bend or break the rules for this one-time event, even to the point of reversing death, how would we as scientists know? What test can we do to prove that this didn't happen? Line up a bunch of incarnate deity corpses and show that they never regain life? As I mentioned, we can't even prove that the world existed last Tuesday.
Now of course, one may find the Resurrection or the other miracles in the Gospels or the Bible to be highly unlikely, given that such things don't happen now. That's a reasonable belief, and I would never imagine that I could dissuade someone like Spong from such a belief, certainly not with the argument above. But it is a *belief*, something arising from philosophy. It is not science.
