N. T. Wright: Can a Scientist Believe the Resurrection? Part One

Dr N. T. Wright, then Bishop of Durham, delivered this lecture " on 15 May 2007 at Babbage Lecture Theatre, Cambridge. It is also posted here on the website of the excellent Cambridge-based science and theology group, Christians in Science. We discussed this lecture at a meeting of the Chico Triad on Philosophy, Theology, and Science (who also participate in Scientists in Congregations), and the paper received high marks from our scientists. It seemed timely and relevant. So I'm reposting, starting with the first section (more to come during Holy Week). Let me know what you think.

N. T. Wright, probably writing another book

Thank you for your welcome and for the unexpected invitation to deliver this lecture. ‘Unexpected’, because I don’t normally lecture on titles with the word ‘science’ in them, for a good reason: I make no claim to know anything about science. I did precisely one year of physics and chemistry at school, and, since I knew before I began that I was going to give them up to concentrate on classics, I did as little work as I could without actually entering a penal zone. In fact, my chemistry report in summer 1963 said, ‘He has maintained his position’ – which I may say was 24th out of 24 – ‘with occasional signs of interest now and then.’ I did, however, love mathematics, with its elegance and harmonies, and it was the subject I was most sorry to give up after O level; but that’s another story.

So a question beginning ‘can a scientist . . .’ is a dangerous one for me to address. Of course, it is possible to give a short and trivial answer, rather like the man who, when asked whether he believed in infant baptism, replied, ‘Sure! I’ve seen it done!’ That, of course, exposes one of the problems with the phrase ‘believe in’: does it mean ‘believe that it can be done’, or ‘believe that it should be done’? And there are other possibilities too, as we shall see. Similarly, to the question ‘can a scientist believe in the resurrection?’ one might simply reply, ‘Sure! I’ve seen it done!’ I know plenty of scientists who firmly and avowedly believe in the resurrection, and some indeed who have given a solid and coherent account of why they do so. I salute them but do not intend tonight to engage with the different ways in which they have presented their case. I want, rather, to explore the fault lines, if that’s the right expression, between different ways of knowing, particularly between what we may loosely call scientific knowing and historical knowing, and between both of these and those other modes of knowing to which we give, very loosely, the names of faith, hope and love.

And my case, you will not be surprised to learn, is that these ways of knowing do in fact overlap and interlock much more than we usually suppose. Certainly, much more than a certain kind of rhetoric would try to persuade us: it has been a feature of the last two hundred years to invoke a kind of pan-enlightenment thesis, namely that the methods and results of modern science have delivered us from the dark superstitions of the past, sometimes designated ‘mediaeval’, so that everything that went before, say, 1750, with a few golden exceptions, was ignorance and guesswork and everything since then has been an upward path towards the light. I am sometimes accused of being anti-Enlightenment, and there is a grain of truth in that because I do think that postmodernity has got some important points to make; but I want to assure you that I have no wish to return to pre-Enlightenment dentistry, sanitation or travel, to look no further. I merely note that there are obvious ambiguities as well as obvious massive gains. The movement that gave us penicillin also gave us Hiroshima. Somehow, as most admit and I suspect all know in their bones, science in the strict sense can never be enough, enough, that is, for a full and flourishing human life in all its dimensions.

But the question then turns on the word ‘believe’, and here too there are puzzles to explore. Plato, of course, declared that ‘belief’ was a kind of second-rate ‘knowing’, more or less half way between knowing and not knowing, so that the objects of ‘belief’ possessed a kind of intermediate ontology, half way between existence and non-existence. This way of thinking has coloured popular usage, so that when we say ‘I believe it’s raining’ we are cushioning ourselves against the possibility that we might be wrong, whereas when we say ‘I know it’s raining’ we are open to straightforward contradiction. But this usage has slid, over the last centuries, to the point where, with a kind of implicit positivism, we use ‘know’ and ‘knowledge’ for things we think we can in some sense prove, and ‘believe’ and its cognates for things which we perceive as degenerating into mere private opinion without much purchase on the wider world.

And the Christian claim was from the beginning that the question of Jesus’ resurrection was a question, not of the internal mental and spiritual states of his followers a few days after his crucifixion, but about something that had happened in the real, public world, leaving not only an empty tomb, but a broken loaf at Emmaus and footprints in the sand by the lake among its physical mementoes, and leaving his followers with a lot of explaining to do but with a transformed worldview which is only explicable on the assumption that something really did happen, even though it stretched their existing worldviews to breaking point. More of that anon. What we now have to do is to examine this early Christian claim more thoroughly, to ask what can be said about it historically, and to enquire, more particularly, what sort of ‘knowing’ or ‘believing’ we are talking about when we ask whether ‘a scientist’ can ‘believe’ that which, it seems, ‘the resurrection’ actually refers to.

First, some reflections – unsystematic musings, really – on the types of knowing. I assume that when we ask ‘can a scientist believe’ something we are asking a two-level question. First, we are asking about what sort of things the ‘scientific method’ can explore, and how it can know or believe certain things. Second, we are asking about the kind of commitment someone wedded to scientific knowing is expected to have in all other areas of his or her life. Is a scientist, for example, expected to have a scientific approach to listening to music? To watching a football game? To falling in love? The question assumes, I think, that ‘the resurrection’, and perhaps particularly ‘the resurrection of Jesus’, is something that might be expected to impinge on the scientist’s area of concern, somewhat as if one were to say ‘can a scientist believe that the sun could rise twice in a day?’, or ‘can a scientist believe that a moth could fly to the moon?’. (I did actually watch the sun set twice in a day; I took off from Aberdeen on a winter afternoon shortly after sunset, and the sun rose again as we climbed, only then to set, gloriously, a second time shortly afterwards. That was, of course, cheating.) This is different, in other words, from saying, ‘can a scientist believe that Schubert’s music is beautiful?’ or ‘can a scientist believe that her husband loves her?’; and there are those, of course, who by redefining the resurrection to make it simply a spiritual experience in the inner hearts and minds of the disciples, have pulled the question towards the latter pair and away from the former. But that is ruled out by what, as we shall see, all first-century users of the language of resurrection meant by the word. ‘Resurrection’ in the first century meant people who were physically thoroughly dead becoming physically thoroughly alive again, not simply ‘suriviving’ or entering a ‘purely spiritual’ world, whatever that might be. And that necessarily impinges on the public world.

But it is the public world, not of the natural scientist, but of the historian. To put it crudely, and again without all the necessary footnotes and nuances, science studies the repeatable, while history studies the unrepeatable. Caesar only crossed the Rubicon once, and if he’d crossed it again it would have meant something different the second time. There was, and could be, only one first landing on the moon. The fall of the second Jerusalem Temple took place in AD 70 and never happened again. Historians don’t of course see this as a problem, and are usually not shy about declaring that these events certainly took place even though we can’t repeat them in the laboratory. But when people say ‘but that can’t have happened, because we know that that sort of thing doesn’t actually happen,’ they are appealing to a kind of would-be scientific principle of history, namely the principle of analogy. The problem with analogy is that it never quite gets you far enough, precisely because history is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, so that the analogies are often at best partial, and are dependent anyway on the retort ‘who says?’ to the objection about some kinds of things not normally happening. And indeed, in the case in point, we should note as an obvious but often overlooked point the fact that the early Christians did not think that Jesus’ resurrection was one instance of something that happened from time to time elsewhere. Granted, they saw it as the first, advance instance of something that would eventually happen to everyone else, but they didn’t employ that future hope as an analogy from which to argue back that it had happened already in this one instance.

So how does the historian work when the evidence points towards things which we do not normally expect? The resurrection is such a prime example of this that it’s hard to produce, at this meta-level, analogies for the question. But, sooner or later, questions of worldview begin to loom up in the background, and the question of what kinds of material the historian will allow on stage is inevitably affected by the worldview within which he or she lives. And at that point we are back to the question of the scientist who, faced with the thoroughly repeatable experiment of what happens to dead bodies, what has always, it seems, happened and what seems likely always to go on happening, declares that the evidence is so massive that it is impossible to believe in the resurrection without ceasing to be a scientist altogether.

This is the point at which we must switch tracks and go to the evidence itself. What can be said, within whatever can be called scientific historiography, about the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead?

Part two in the next post...

No confusion: Science and art can be illuminated by faith

Greg Cootsona, pondering whether he's confusing

Sometimes I’m afraid I confuse people in my congregation. 

Here’s what I mean: I’m writing this piece somewhere between Bidwell Presbyterian’s February Religion and Science conference and our March-April “Seeing the Savior” art show. Science and art: How in the world do I think these two disciplines come together, not to mention, do they meet somewhere with Christian faith?

The key claim I’ll make is admittedly audacious: Christian faith doesn’t close our world. It opens us to new discoveries.

I’ll put some onus on the 17^th chapter of Acts, where Paul quotes the first century secular writer Epimenides, who writes in “In Him we live and move and have our being.” In other words, Paul is engaging with a secular poet about the nature of the physical world—we would today call science. And, here Paul links both science and poetry with faith. Paul even asserts that Epimenides’s Deity “unknown to the Greeks” is actually fully revealed and “known” through the Christian gospel. Apparently, faith didn’t close Paul to discovery, but opened him to see new depth and connections.

Fairly early in my Christian faith, as an undergrad at Berkeley, I discovered that contemporary worldviews were often restrictive. I was surprised that one of the secular prophets in my day, Michel Foucault—from whom I learned a great deal—was still remarkably weak in providing depth. His philosophy was very French, erudite, and compelling, but ultimately quite limiting. It didn’t ultimately offer meaning. Today, we hear Richard Dawkins opine that the universe is “blind, pitiless indifference.” Others call human beings “machines made of meat.” I wouldn’t describe that as a philosophy that inspires. I discovered it then and continue to see today how limited many atheist philosophies are.

And yet, when I approach science and art from faith, it becomes surprisingly illuminating. As my second example, I often see artistic expression—whether poetry, music, paintings, or various other arts—as the search for beauty, which takes us back to Creator of this beautiful world. As the famous poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote,

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty,
Back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.

That’s why I think artists should be in the congregation and art in the churches. That’s why we are bringing paintings from several different ethnic visual artists to our congregation. Because they help us “see the Savior” in new ways, to make new connections. Because beauty is God’s, and artists bring a fresh appreciation of beauty back to the church. And, as Hopkins points out, because all this beauty flows from the Source of beauty, God.

In the midst of these two events, I’m also teaching a class on the literary scholar C. S. Lewis. He closed a lecture at the Oxford Socratic Society (a group designed to debate the truth of Christianity in light of other disciplines) with an assertion that Christian theology, in contrast to an atheistic scientism can fit in “science, art, morality.” It illuminates them. Lewis concluded with this telling line: “I believe in Christianity as I believe in that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”

That’s also been my discovery. I hope it’s accurate for my congregation… and anybody else who wants to come along for the ride.

This article also appeared in our local paper, Chico Enterprise-Record, here.

The Good News of Creation in Light of Contemporary Science

The icy blue of Lake Tahoe's waters

[This is excerpted from Creation and Last Things. I wrote it over ten years ago. So I've adapted it, and I'm interested to hear any comments about how it needs further updating.]

I have sat many times at the edge of Lake Tahoe under the summer sun, breathing the fresh mountain air and contemplating the beauty and austerity of its icy blue waters surrounded by gorgeously majestic peaks. There I find witnesses to God’s mysterious power and deity. More than once, Paul’s words from Romans 1:20 have come to me: 

Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.

Creation as a finished artistic product witnesses to the Master Artist. A stanza from the whimsical twentieth century poet, e.e. cummings (admittedly not without a whiff of pantheism) describes the beauty and joy of creation: 

I thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees 

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything 

which is natural which is infinite which is yes.

        In fact, the entire cosmos is an enormous Yes to God the Creator. From this wide-angle, cosmic perspective, the doctrine of creation affirms first of all that the universe began at an initial point at the command of God. It then says that the world—it all its magnitude and complexity—depends ultimately on God. Most of all, it proclaims that these affirmations are good news.

        We often think that the “good news” begins in the opening chapters of the New Testament. There is, however, probably more blessing pronounced in the first paragraphs of the Bible than anywhere else in the Scripture. Repeatedly in Genesis 1, God declares that creation “good” (verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 25) and even “very good” (verse 31). This makes all the difference for how we understand the doctrine of creation.

        When we think of the cosmic level, we do well to think beyond the tangible of space and time, and of the world that our senses describe. The most ancient church-wide statement of faith, the fourth-century Nicene Creed, speaks of God’s creating things “seen and unseen.” God creates not only the world that science discovers and measures, but the world of spiritual beings or angels. Since I usually focus on the relation of theology and science—and thus the tangible world (more or less)—I rarely comment extensively on the angelic (and demonic) realm of creation. Still the angelic world keeps us reminded of the full depth of creation and the limits of even our greatest scientific discoveries.

        Within the bounds of space and time, we will do well also to remember the scope of the cosmos. We need to think big. Let us never forget that our God is the Creator of the universe, and natural science can point us to the grandeur of God’s creation. Contemporary astrophysics portrays the enormous scale of the universe, which began 13.7 billion years ago. This fact cures us of self-centeredness. If the age universe were reduced to twenty-four hours, human beings would only appear just two or three seconds before midnight.

        Furthermore, big bang cosmology describes an “initial point of singularity” where time began, which scientists call t=0. At this singularity, all laws of physics break down. The Belgian priest and mathematician, George Lemaître spoke of t=0 as a “ day without yesterday,” where space was infinitely curved and all energy and all matter was concentrated into a single quantum. The big bang is derived from Albert Einstein’s 1916 theory of general relativity, which pointed to an expanding universe. Einstein initially resisted this implication, preferring a universe that remained relatively static. So he fudged his equations with the “cosmological constant,” which removed expansion in the universe, keeping it in relatively constant stasis. It took two powerful minds to persuade Einstein that an expanding universe—and therefore one with a beginning point—could be empirically and mathematically verified. Lemaître, who was fond of saying, “There is no conflict between science and religion,” offered the theoretical structure for this expansion. The unparalleled master of astronomical observation, Edwin Hubble, provided the observational data. Their work eventually convinced Einstein that the universe was expanding. (Einstein later fumed: “If Hubble’s expansion had been discovered at the time of the creation of the general theory of relativity, the [cosmological constant] would never have been introduced.”) Extrapolating backward, this expansion implied an initial singularity.

        But Einstein would not be the only scientist in need of persuasion. The reigning view of the time was Cambridge professor Fred Hoyle’s “steady state” cosmology, which he and two colleagues, Herman Bondi and Thomas Gold, presented in 1948. This theory stated that the universe was virtually unchanging and of infinite age. The cosmos always was, and always will be, the same. Hoyle did not like the implications of creation out of nothing for theological and philosophical reasons:

Unlike the modern school of cosmologists, who in conformity with Judaeo-Christian theologians believe the whole universe to have been created out of nothing, my beliefs accord with those of Democritus who remarked "Nothing is created out of nothing."

Hoyle argued forcefully for the steady state theory and disparagingly described its alternative as the “big bang.”

        In the 1950s and ‘60s, these two theories vied for scientific approval. It was not until 1965 that Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias at the Bell Laboratories detected background static radiation in the cosmos. This static was so unexpected that Wilson and Penzias believed pigeons had roosted in their huge instruments. In fact they had, but once they were removed, the background static remained as “echoes” of that initial moment of explosive creation. The COBE satellite probed outer space in 1989 and found further confirmation of this background radiation (technically, through its Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotemeter). The COBE homepage puts it this way.

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectrum is that of a nearly perfect blackbody with a temperature of 2.725 +/- 0.002 K. This observation matches the predictions of the hot Big Bang theory extraordinarily well, and indicates that nearly all of the radiant energy of the Universe was released within the first year after the Big Bang. 

        These discoveries seem to provide an amazing consonance with the concept of creation out of nothing by God’s command. Robert Jastrow, an astrophysicist formerly at the Mount Wilson Observatory and a self-described agnostic, has penned these rather striking comments on the Big Bang cosmologist who looks at the first chapters of Genesis:

A sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our Universe; but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is. The scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation. This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth…. At the moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

     Theologians have long held that creation happened “at once,” and can be flattered by Jastrow’s conclusions about big bang cosmology, but will be wise to continue listening to scientists’ developing theories about the nature of our universe. There are even some questions theologians need to ask: What about new theories (such as the Hartle-Hawking model or Lawrence Krauss's more challenge) that impugn the big bang scientifically? Are creation out of nothing and the moment of the big bang the same thing? I will leave responses for another post, but I'd be interested in your comments on the way there.