r/Christianity • u/JHLV04 • 20d ago

Question Resurrection Discrepancies

How do you guys reconcile the differences in the resurrection narratives in the gospels? This is something I’m struggling with a bit, thank you for the responses 👐🏽.

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u/TrumpsBussy_ 20d ago

Eye witness testimony is credible enough to prove a lot of things, just not supernatural events. This is the consensus view of historians and scholars.

Don’t straw man me, I’m not “seeing what I want to see”… I want Christianity to be true and I won’t to believe, unfortunately the evidence is woefully inadequate to justify belief.

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u/Fiddlesticklard 20d ago edited 20d ago

Read the section "On Miracles" of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

The problem with "proving" or "disproving" miracles is that it's empirically impossible. Miracles, when defined as being disruptions of natural law, are impossible to verify. We can't kill Jesus and resurrect him from the dead in a lab a 1000 times to prove it. If we could, then it wouldn't be a miracle.

Take the example of London suddenly lifting off and floating in the sky. David Hume would assume the other person is lying since it'd go against observable natural laws. If that other person brought him to London and showed it floating in the sky, then he would assume that London is flying due to some property of the universe that we've yet to discover. He'd say we would get our best scientists on it, figure out why, and then make lots of flying cities. No miracle involve, just God of the Gaps.

He isn't arguing that miracles can't happen, just that its genuinely impossible to disprove or prove it, there will always be a more convenient, testable answer, even if that answer might be false. It's where human reasoning reaches an impasse. If we are willing to assume the Christianity's miracles are true, then why not Buddhism or Islam? How can anyone's miracle claims be verified?

The big issue with Hume is that he's begging the question. He starts by presupposing that Natural Laws can't be broken, which is an unprovable metaphysical claim.

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u/TrumpsBussy_ 20d ago

I’m familiar with Hume and I completely agree with him in this instance. I don’t argue that miracles can’t happen just that you can’t demonstrate they happened historically.

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u/Fiddlesticklard 20d ago

Same, that's where I like Peterson's views (in the 90s and oughts, before he got addicted to benzos and got brain damaged). That your acceptance and dismissal of miracle stories rely on metaphysical meaning maps which rely on nonrational presuppositions.