EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS OUR CONSIDERATION

The Resurrection, Evidence, and The Scientist

by S. Joshua Swamidass for The Veritas Forum

I am a scientist. I am often asked about evidence I see for the Resurrection. This is how I explain it to them.

Science is full of trust-like faith. We believe grand, counterintuitive things because we trust the accounts of trustworthy sources.

Mass is energy. Time slows with gravity and acceleration. The earth moves around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Two black holes merged 1.3 billion years ago, sending gravitational waves through space that arrived last year at LIGO. In principle, this is all reproducible, but just in principle. If we personally verified and reproduced every experiment ourselves, science would grind to a complete halt.  Yes, we emphasize evidence.  But we usually trust the scientific consensus. Yes, we are skeptical and regularly challenge accepted theories. But we usually trust other scientists’ reports of what they have seen.

I am a scientist. Still, on Easter, I celebrate that Jesus rose from the dead about 2,000 years ago. This event, in first-century Palestine, is the cornerstone of everything. In the same way that trust-like faith in science is connected to evidence, so is the faith I have in the Resurrection.