The Implausibility and Low Explanatory Power of the Resurrection Hypothesis

I'm going to quote and comment on a long academic article attacking the Resurrection:                                                                                             

Robert Greg Cavin & Carlos A. Colombetti, "The Implausibility and Low Explanatory Power of the Resurrection Hypothesis —With a Rejoinder to Stephen T. Davis." SHERM 2/1 (2020): 37‒94.

The article is somewhat challenging to comment on because the authors are responding to a variety of Christian philosophers and apologists, viz. Craig, Davis, Plantinga et al. I don't necessarily formulate the case for miracles or the Resurrection the way they do, so in some cases I may reframe the argument. 

The authors also use abbreviations: (R=the Resurrection); (SM=the Standard Model of particle physics); (LCE=the law of conservation of energy) 

for example, the natural regularity that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. God is (by definition of “God”) omnipotent and so Davis must agree that

Necessarily, if God causes water to freeze at 76 degrees Fahrenheit, then water freezes at 76 degrees Fahrenheit.

i) That's ambiguous. If it freezes at 76º, is it still water or a different substance? If it freezes at 76º, does it have the same chemical composition as H2O?

A better question is whether God can cause a substance that performs the same function as water to freeze at 76º?

ii) Another question is whether an omnipotent God can naturally cause water to freeze at 76º? Or is this a miracle? If the latter, it might still be water. 

iii) To perform its natural function, the freezing point of water must be consistent with other things in nature. In a system of physical cause and effect, other adjustments would be necessary for everything to work together naturally. And there may be a limited number of naturally feasible combinations of alternatives. 

This states that SM  entails that God does not cause SM to be false. Given the strength of “does not cause” as we have just seen above, this entails that God does not supernaturally interfere with the natural order to override the laws of SM . But, now, SM is a scientific theory that is exceptionally well-confirmed for the realm of familiar, everyday objects—which, of course, includes corpses and what happens to them. Now since Davis acknowledges that SM is very strongly confirmed for the everyday realm, he must also agree with our conclusion that it is impossible and therefore maximally implausible on SM that God supernaturally interferes (or intervenes) in that realm—a realm that includes corpses. For, as we will show in the next section below, SM entails that God (if he exists) does not do this.

The fact that SM is a well-confirmed theory creates no presumption for divine nonintervention. It simply describes outcomes in cases where there is no divine intervention. It's well-confirmed that vending machines don't dispense food unless someone interacts with them. Left to their own devices, they just stand there doing nothing. 

Divine intervention doesn't falsify SM because SM is about outcomes when nature is free to run its course unimpeded. SM may accurately describe that state of affairs. 

Nor are we denying divine omnipotence, i.e., that God (if he exists) has the power to supernaturally intervene in the affairs of the physical universe, e.g., by raising Jesus from the dead. What we are arguing, rather, is that SM and R are inconsistent and, that, because they are, SM entails that God does not exercise his power to supernaturally interfere in the affairs of the physical universe so as to violate the laws of SM—most significantly, by raising Jesus from the dead. It is only in this special sense of “relative to SM” that that we argue that it is “impossible” and, thus, “maximally implausible,” i.e., “epistemically improbable,” for God to supernaturally interfere in the affairs of the physical universe covered by SM and, thus, raise Jesus from the dead.

Could Davis reply that SM  entails ~R only when the natural realm is left to its own devices, i.e., only when God does not supernaturally intervene? No. This is because SM entails that God never supernaturally intervenes in the affairs of the universe that lie within its scope.

There's a fundamental sense in which the Resurrection is supposed to be inconsistent with SM, not because SM is false, not because they can't both be true, but they can't both be operative in reference to the same outcome. If the Resurrection happened, then  SM was in abeyance in reference to the Resurrection. They can't be simultaneously operative in reference to the same outcome because the Resurrection is a supernatural event. But they are not inconsistent in the sense of logically contradictory principles. They're not logically mutually exclusive, but mutually exclusive in reference to the same outcome. 

by consulting the reference works, research journals, and textbooks of physics, there actually is an answer to this question. This information appears in the very terms for the events, states, entities, properties, relations, etc. in which the equations of SM are formulated. For all these terms refer to what is physical and thus natural. Indeed, none refer to the supernatural, as we are certain that Davis must surely agree. Yet, contrary to what Davis thinks, it is precisely because of this that the equations of SM entail that only those things that are physical can interact with things that are physical and, in consequence, ~R.

one finds no mention of supernatural intervention in connection with the equations of SM (and of physics more generally) in the reference works, research journals, and textbooks of physics.

Indeed, as observed above, the equations of SM only contain terms for events, states, entities, properties, relations, etc. that are physical and thus natural. With this, Davis must surely agree.32 Yet it immediately follows from this that these equations entail that only physical things can interact with things that are physical. And it follows from this, of course, that SM entails ~R since R hypothesizes the supernatural event of God raising Jesus from the dead.

Let us explain this further. Any scientific law containing only the aforementioned terms can have, accordingly, only physical input variables and physical output variables and, consequently, only inputs and outputs that are natural, i.e., not supernatural.

Our first counterreply to the Proviso Objection is that the laws of SM, as these are actually stated in scientific reference works, research journals, and textbooks, do not contain the supernatural non-interference proviso R. These sources never state the laws of SM —or, indeed, any laws of physics—as conditionals having the supernatural non-interference proviso R as their antecedent. Indeed, one searches the scientific literature in vain for even a passing reference to R—even stated in different wording. All one actually finds are the equations of SM themselves—stated unconditionally and, thus, as laws that hold without this proviso. Yet one would surely think that, if R were an integral and essential component of these equations, as Craig and other defenders of R claim, it should be found to occur in at least one formulation of them within the entire corpus of this scientific literature. But the fact is: one finds mention of R only in the arguments of these Christian philosophers of religion and apologists. And this is telling.

i) Physics textbooks don't contain ceteris paribus-clauses about miracles because the purpose of a physics textbook is to teach students how to do physics, not how to perform miracles. You can't use physics to perform a miracle. For that matter, you can't be taught how to perform a miracle. It's not a skill, but a supernatural ability. 

ii) There's also a genre distinction. A monograph on the philosophy science ought to discuss ceteris paribus-clauses about miracles because its purpose is not to teach students how to perform scientific calculations and operations, but the normal operating assumptions of science, as well as real or hypothetical exceptions or limitations. 

iii) Keep in mind, too, that most physics textbooks are probably written by atheists, and even if they were written by Christians, a publisher would be unlikely to publish a physics textbook with a sympathetic excursus on miracles. 

But then it follows on SM, contrary to what Davis thinks, that in the case of the Resurrection the input is entirely natural—the event of the body of Jesus being a corpse in some state of postmortem decomposition at the moment just prior to the alleged Resurrection—and the output is also natural and, thus, not supernatural—the event of the body of Jesus not being supernaturally raised from the dead by God at the next moment. For every natural input or output is, equivalently, an input or output that is not supernatural. 

Even if the risen body of Jesus is a natural, it doesn't follow that the cause is natural. 

Since the laws of SM have only natural inputs and outputs, it immediately follows that they have no supernatural inputs or outputs. Otherwise, they would be at least partly the laws of the supernatural—not the laws of nature.

i) The authors lean on the concept of natural laws, but that's a disputed concept in the philosophy of science. On one level or definition, natural laws describe what will happen if nature is free to run its course, but they don't cause or determine what will happen. On that view, they're not "lawful" in the prescriptive or proscriptive sense. 

On another level of definition, "natural laws" are labels for natural forces, processes, mechanisms, and physical causes. On that view they are "lawful" in the prescriptive or proscriptive sense, but conditionally rather than absolutely, when the outcome isn't caused by an outside agent. 

Contrary to Davis, moreover, SM is not merely inconsistent with R but actually inconsistent with it in three distinct ways. First, R states that the body of Jesus was raised from the dead supernaturally by God, whereas SM denies this, entailing that the body of Jesus was at the mercy of purely natural factors. 

SM doesn't deny that. SM is neutral on what happens when SM is circumvented by outside factors that intervene to change the natural outcome. SM can't speak to that issue one way or the other because a supernatural outcome is naturally unpredictable. 

Second, R states that the body of Jesus was raised as an immortal and imperishable soma pneumatikon, whereas SM  denies this, stating that the body of Jesus was neither immortal nor imperishable but entirely natural. To be immortal and imperishable, the resurrection body would have to be ontologically sui generis—comprised of some mysterious non-physical “schmatoms” rather than the ordinary atoms of SM. 

i) Which assumes without benefit of argument that a body can't be naturally immortal. It assumes that mortality is naturally inevitable. Maybe so, maybe not. It requires more analysis and argument.

ii) A body needn't be composed of something nonphysical rather than ordinary atoms to be immortal. Indeed, it wouldn't be a body if it was composed of nonphysical constituents. Indeed, it wouldn't be composite at all if wasn't physical. 

iii) What it needs to be immortal is that it's vital functions never cease. There can be complete turnover in the atoms and molecules that compose the body, eventually replacing al; the original atoms and molecules. It doesn't have to be the same body at the compositional level but the structural level. Preserving a particular combination of atoms and molecules. Preserving the physical pattern. Physical continuity rather than identity. 

iv) In the context of Paul's usage, "imperishable" doesn't mean indestructible. He's just using it as a pleonastic synonym for immortality. Notice his use of synonymous parallelism. The glorified body isn't subject to death by the aging process. It has greater regenerative powers and resistance to disease. It may still be vulnerable to fatal harm, but God providentially protects or heals it in cases that exceed its natural resources. At least that's my own view. I'm not obliged to defer to the model of Cavin and Colombetti. 

Finally, R states that the body of Jesus is able to dematerialize out of and materialize back into the physical universe from the moment of the Resurrection on, whereas SM denies this, stating rather that the body of Jesus is confined forever to the physical universe where it (perhaps over a period of billions of years) undergoes the complete course of postmortem decomposition. This is because, according to SM, a body is a collection of particles and these, in turn, are actually oscillations in various quantum fields, e.g., electron and various quark fields. It makes no sense on SM , accordingly, to state that a body can leave the physical universe. 

i) That that glorified body of Christ is able to dematerialize out of and materialize back into the physical universe is not an implication of the Resurrection or Resurrection accounts, but an interpretation popularized by some Christian apologists. The inference that Jesus could walk through solid doors (which I've discussed before). Or examples of is appearing and vanishing. 

But appearing and vanishing can be psychological in the sense that the observer's mind is prevented from perceiving a physical object even though it lies in his field of vision. 

Or it can be an objective, instantaneous change of location, yet not due to his body having supernatural properties, but because Jesus has supernatural abilities. 

ii) The body of Jesus may well be confined to our universe. Conversely, God may have made a multiverse, in which case his body might exist in a parallel universe. 

iii) Once again, immortality doesn't require a body to contain the same collection of particles over time. It's the same body in the sense of having the same configuration of particles, not the same particles. A physical copy of an abstract blueprint. It doesn't require identity at the level of the individual constituents. At least, that's my own position. I'm not obligated to submit to the confused and arbitrary strictures of Cavin and Colombetti. 

Would a being who, as even Christians concede, allows such horrors as the Black Death and the Holocaust, supernaturally intervene to raise Jesus from the dead? Would God send Jesus as his chosen prophet and messiah and then raise him from the dead as a sign to prove his divine authority? There seems to be no way to answer these questions—other than by appealing to the equations of SM and receiving a negative answer.

To the contrary, the way to answer that question is through history, testimonial evidence, and revelation. 

To rescue R, he might attempt to undermine that conclusion by arguing that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support the equations of SM. But this strategy will not work. For the scientific evidence for SM is overwhelming. Its equations have been subjected to an incredible number of experimental tests made over the last several decades. During this time, literally billions upon billions of confirmation instances for SM  have been accumulated from the Large Hadron Collider alone. The data resulting from these experiments are as diverse and unbiased—and, thus, representative—as any sample used in scientific reasoning can be. And, significantly, all of these items of evidence have one thing in common. They are all cases in which both the input and the output events were natural. None are cases in which natural inputs were followed by supernatural outputs, i.e., cases in which agents supernaturally interfered. There is simply no case of any experiment in any lab to test SM that has yielded a miracle. 

That's a red herring. There's no reason to expect supernatural outputs from these experiments. God and angels have no incentive to manipulate those outputs.

It is overwhelmingly probable given the billions upon billions of confirmation instances that have been accumulated for SM  that the non-physical has no contact of any kind with the physical. 

Actually, there are well-documented cases of demonic possession, poltergeists, angelophanies, and psychokinesis. Cavin and Colombetti are looking in the wrong places and consulting irrelevant literature. Atom smashers are not where to look. 

For they argue that the laws of nature contain an implicit “causal closure” proviso to the effect that God or other agents do not supernaturally interfere.43 And, of course, there would be no reason for them to so argue unless they realized that, apart from this proviso, the equations of SM  are inconsistent with R.44 Their opponents, however, hold the traditional view that the laws of nature lack the supernatural non-interference proviso.

First, his causal closure proviso is inadequate because it is limited to God alone. A causal closure proviso, however, must exclude all supernatural interference. Consequently, Plantinga’s proviso must be modified to exclude the supernatural interference of angels, devils, ghosts, witches, and the like. 

That's true. 

The second problem with Plantinga’s interpretation of the laws of the natural sciences is that it makes a mockery of the entire scientific enterprise. Are we really to believe with Plantinga that the scientists of CERN must first exclude the supernatural interference of God every time they perform their experiments? And, again, why stop there? What about the heptads of devils or impish faeries who seek to undermine the progress of humanity by foiling our experiments? The fact that scientists do not even think about—let alone take precautions against—supernatural interference shows that they dismiss this as a “non-starter,” just as they should.

Plantinga’s interpretation of the laws of nature turns what are genuinely scientific laws into flaky metaphysico-theological principles. Indeed, if Plantinga were correct, both scientifically testing the law of conservation of energy and then applying it to everyday life would require—bizarrely—that scientists and the rest of us first show in every single case that no angels, demons, imps, ghosts, faeries, et al. are causally affecting the system in question. Since these beings, according to folklore, are typically hidden from our senses and escape our most sensitive scientific detectors (i.e., since they are for all practical purposes invisible, inaudible, and intangible), there is no way scientifically to show that the system in question is not being causally affected by them—except in those rare occasions in which they choose to reveal their malevolent or teasing activities to us.

Imagine what the world would be like. You could not know whether an ordinary glass of water would turn into poison until you first determined that no interfering demon was going to supernaturally change it.

this objection reveals a deplorable double-standard employed by Miraculists and defenders of R. They have no problem in letting “science decide” that the naturalistic rivals to R have low explanatory scope and power. Indeed, they appeal to the science of human physiology in the case of the Apparent Death hypothesis and to the science of human psychology in the case of the Hallucination hypothesis.

That's a variation on Lewontin's divine foot in the door. The problem is that Cavin and Colombetti are arbitrarily isolating their attack on Christian miracles from the Christian worldview. But the Christian worldview includes a doctrine of ordinary providence. By divine design, the physical world normally operates like a machine. Governed by second causes. We don't reach for a supernatural explanation if a natural explanation will suffice. If physical cause and effect are adequate to account for the outcome, we have no reason to go beyond that. It's only for outcomes that are naturally impossible or inexplicable, or (in the case coincidence miracles) outcomes which are too discriminating, opportune, and antecedently unlikely to be dumb luck, that we infer divine intercession. 

Plantinga is thus forced into the awkward position of having to claim against this—and with absolutely no supporting evidence—that these laws nonetheless do contain a theistic causal closure proviso, but one that is merely “implicit” in them.

Depends on whether the source is definitions in physics textbooks or demonstrable events which show that nature is not a closed system but open to influence by agents with the power of mental causation to change the ordinary course of physical outcomes. The authors have it backwards. We should begin, not with textbook definitions, but the world. If there are miracles, then the "laws of nature" are factually required to include ceteris paribus-clauses. Definitions need to matchup with reality. 

God, being an immaterial spirit, is not physical and thus lacks energy. As a result, he and the physical universe cannot exchange energy in any form— since he has no energy to exchange. And the same holds for all other non-physical agents: angels, devils, ghosts, et al. Moreover, those physical agents who possess energy but, nonetheless, allegedly perform supernatural actions (e.g., magicians, prophets, and witches) do not perform these actions by exchanging energy with their physical surroundings. Thus, in the case of all alleged supernatural actions, no energy is transferred between the agent performing the action and the physical system he or she performs it on, and yet the energy of that system nonetheless change In the Ascension, for example, no upward kinetic energy is transferred from God to the body of the Risen Jesus (or to his body from its physical surroundings). Rather, upward kinetic energy is supernaturally created in the body of the Risen Jesus by God. But this violates what is stated by the proviso-free formulation of the law of conservation of energy, viz., that any change in the kinetic energy of the body of the Risen Jesus must be equal to the energy transferred to it—transferred to it, that is, by its physical surroundings—since its non-physical surroundings, including God, have no energy to transfer. 

i) Since the Ascension is a miracle, why presume the levitation of Jesus necessitated physical energy? 

ii) Assuming for the sake of argument that miracles, or some miracles, change the amount of energy in the system, how much energy do miracles require, and is that measurable at a cosmic level? Would the infusion of new extra energy mess up the universe? How much would it take to have an appreciable effect? 

iii) Does the universe have a uniform amount of energy or is it losing energy due to entropy and cosmic heat death? 

iv) If, in addition, we have good evidence for miracles, and that conflicts with the conservation of energy law, then the law needs to be modified to bring it into conformity with what actually happens in the real world. 

Craig, Davis and, indeed, Resurrectionists in general see no problem in their assertion that R, in contrast to its naturalistic rivals, can explain the sensory experiences had by the women, the disciples, and other witnesses of what they took to be the Risen Jesus physically appearing to themselves. Indeed, since Resurrectionists insist that the body of the Risen Jesus is physical, they see no problem for R in explaining these. Davis even thinks that, because of its physicality, the body of the Risen Jesus could have actually been photographed

This appeal to the physicality of the Risen Jesus surely explains the failure of Resurrectionists to ever give an actual argument to show that and how R can explain the appearances: they merely assume that it does and then, ironically, condemn its naturalistic rivals for their failure to explain these. Nonetheless, as we show in “Assessing,” there is an insuperable problem here: R cannot explain the postmortem appearances of the Risen Jesus.72 We explain this problem in greater detail now.

The problem, simply, is this: in order to function, the senses require physical inputs that are the physical outputs of the physical objects being sensed, e.g., photons in the case of the eyes, sound waves in the case of the ears, and physical contact pressure in the case of Meissner corpuscles of the epidermis

certain subatomic particles within them (the electron, electron neutrino, and the photon) are hypothesized never to decay, all other particles do, and the physical bodies constructed from them are thus neither immortal nor imperishable. 

But now , R hypothesizes, in seeming contradiction to this, that the body of the Risen Jesus is both physical and a soma pneumatikon—a body that is both immortal and imperishable.

the body of Jesus after its resurrection lacks all of the physicalSM properties it had before that—most fundamentally, existence in the physicalSM universe. It thus exists in its own non-physicalSM universe and can have absolutely no contact with our physicalSM universe. As a result, it cannot appear in the Upper Room; walk across the floor; be seen, heard, or touched by the women and disciples; pick up and eat a piece of fish; appear to Paul in heavenly glory; etc. For, on SM, only those things that are themselves physicalSM can interact with things that are physicalSM.

This repeats the same objection I already addressed.  They seem to construe the Greek phrase "soma pneumatikon" as an immaterial body. But as scholars have explained, the adjective has reference, not to the composition of the body, but to a corporeal existence conditioned by the Holy Spirit. 

Let us first consider the earliest Gospel, Mark. Since L hypothesizes that the Easter traditions evolved as legend, it is not improbable on L that Mark would contain only the tradition of the discovery of the empty tomb and thus no traditions of appearances of the Risen Jesus to his followers. In contrast, this is unthinkable on ~L since this hypothesizes that all of the New Testament Easter traditions are historical fact based on eyewitness testimony. In fact, however, Mark relates only the discovery of the empty tomb and no appearances. This is in marked contrast to the other three gospels, which contain detailed and highly elaborate accounts of the appearances of the Risen Jesus. Call this difference between Mark and the other sources “L-.” Then it is clear that L- confirms L to a greater degree than ~L. Some have attempted to argue that the original manuscript of Mark did contain a final section relating appearances of the Risen Jesus but that this was somehow lost in the later copies. Yet this would be virtually impossible on ~L given the supposedly extreme care the early church exercised in transmitting, maintaining, and copying its sacred documents.

i) Although Mk 16:6-7 contains no visual description of a Resurrection appearance, it contains a statement affirming the fact of the Resurrection.

ii) From what I've read, it's not uncommon for ancient MSS to lose pages at the beginning or ending. The front and back of MSS were especially vulnerable to damage. The Codex Vaticanus is a well-known example.