Easter and Philosphy

 

    I would like to discuss difficulties with the resurrection, post Enlightenment. I have observed in myself a tendency that is probably quite common when it comes to the super-natural (in the strict sense of not conforming to how we believe on the authority of science nature works and what is possible and impossible). This tendency is a success of cultural positivism: when a dogma x (e.g. the Incarnation) seems to violate the well-established laws of physics or biology, reinterpret x in a spiritual sense, or as mystery, relying on our metaphysical finitude (“more things in heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy/science”). This moves x out of the range of the empirically, objectively testable and into a range where certain kinds of experience come into play, not proving x in a logical or scientific sense, but making x seem plausible, making x make sense of these experiences. These experiences are hinge experiences like loving your children, and to the extent to dogma opens up space for a world in which love is real, they make sense of the experience.

     I fully understand why someone like Christopher Hitchens would reject this move, and due to the metaphysical finitude (can't get out of the world or experience to objectively compare our pictures of reality, how reality needs to be to correspond to our most deeply felt needs) it remains an intellectual stalemate between the person of faith and Hitchens, which allows one to go on believing without making Kierkegaard’s fully irrational leap of faith (i.e., I believe because it is absurd). Science can't replace metaphysics because our experience of the world is on another plane than that of science.

      When it comes to the resurrection story, this approach breaks down. I have been inclined to see the resurrection as some kind of epiphany or mystical experience. But this not only goes against the plain sense of the Gospels (not an absolute barrier for me) but probably changes the essence of the faith. It seems God would need to help us poor post-Enlightenment people. At some points, it seems you have to positively choose irrationality to accept traditional Christianity. Was Kierkegaard right?

   Indeed, the retreat into the merely spiritual can feel like both an evasion and a genuine attempt to preserve meaning. First, the epistemological dilemma. Folks like myself are caught between three powerful intuitions: 1) the authority of modern science (nature appears governed by stable, exceptionless laws. Dead bodies do not come back to life); 2)the authority of the Gospel witness (the resurrection is not presented as a vague spiritual survival or inner illumination, but as something stubbornly concrete: empty tomb, eating fish, wounds touched); 3) our metaphysical finitude (we cannot step outside our conceptual schemes to compare “reality as it is” with “reality as we see it”). Thus the need to reinterpret the resurrection so that it no longer conflicts with (1), even if that strains (2), justified by (3). The cost is apparent. At some point, the thing itself may have been transformed into something else.

  If the resurrection becomes merely an inner experience of the disciples, a symbolic expression of hope, or or a myth encoding moral truth, then several things happen. The apostles look less like witnesses and more like interpreters of an experience. And most importantly: death is not actually defeated, only re-described. This is why someone like Hitchens presses so hard here: once you concede this move, the claim becomes psychologically intelligible but metaphysically thin.

      What about the status of the “laws of nature” that seem to exclude resurrection. You can understand them as describing what is metaphysically impossible to violate. In that case, the Resurrection would be impossible.  You can also describe them as describing what always happens in our experience, but not legislating what reality must do in all possible cases. In that description, the Resurrection becomes highly improbable, but not incoherent. Or the “laws of nature” may describe how created things act given their natures, but do not bind the source of being itself (Aquinas). In that case, the Resurrection is not a violation, but an act from a deeper ontological level. I notice in myself that (modern as I am) I tend to slide the second to the first without noticing. Yes, in the strong understanding of the laws, the belief in resurrection becomes irrational (Hitchens). But if the laws of nature are not metaphysically absolute in that sense, then the issue shifts from whether resurrection is impossible to whether there sufficient reason to take this particular claim seriously?

    The deeper problem does not involve the problem of science and miracles but trust. We cannot step outside our experience to compare worldviews. That entails that science itself rests on trust in the intelligibility and regularity of the world, even as historical knowledge rests on trust in testimony and personal life rests on trust in persons. The resurrection question is therefore not purely scientific. It involves the question of whether these witnesses be trusted when they claim something that lies beyond ordinary experience. And here the tension becomes existential rather than purely epistemic.

  Indeed, the resurrection is different from other “supernatural” claims. It is not a private mystical experience or a vague metaphysical postulate; rather, it is a claim about a concrete event in public reality. Thus It cannot be safely relocated into “symbol” without loss. Indeed, it confronts the modern worldview directly. In a way, Christianity has tied its own hands here. As St. Paul says: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain.” There is no easy retreat.

    Perhaps instead of choosing between a literalism that forces many of us into epistemological embarrassment and a symbolism that dissolves the connection to reality, there is a third path? The Resurrection as ontological breakthrough, not anomaly; not a “magic violation” of nature, but the manifestation of a deeper layer of reality ordinarily hidden. This does not make it scientifically predictable but neither is consciousness, freedom, or value fully capturable by physics. In this view, the resurrection is not against reality; it reveals that reality is more than the closed system we often assume.

    I am sure that belief continues because certain experiences make it plausible. (I related my experience at my grandmother’s funeral and its connection to fully conscious beliefs in a recent entry.) Such experiences are not proof, of course, but may indicate an attunement with reality. Think of experiences of goodness that feel unconditional, encounters with persons that seem to exceed utility, or the sense that love is not merely subjective but claims reality. Such experiences shape the question about the Resurrection. If reality includes this kind of depth, is it closed to something like resurrection?

     I think there is no way out of the intellectual stalemate (see Hans Küng, Existiert Gott? And Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking). But the stalemate exists because one side assumes closure of the natural order. The other assumes openness to transcendent agency. Neither can be proven from a neutral standpoint. So the decision is not reason vs. irrationality, but rather which metaphysical picture best makes sense of the whole of experience and whether this experience can be trusted as a disclosure of what the world must be like.

    I wrote that it seems God would need to help us poor post-Enlightenment people. Perhaps the deeper issue is not that belief requires irrationality, but that it requires a form of trust (grounded in the deepest existential experiences) that cannot be compelled by argument alone. And that is precisely what feels most difficult to a mind trained in philosophy. We moderns are caught between the Scylla of naïve acceptance (which Tolstoi so admired in the Russian peasantry) and the Charybdis of easy reinterpretation.  Accepting the Resurrection requires entrusting myself to a picture of reality that cannot be secured through natural reason alone.

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       But even granting that I have metaphysical conceptual space for the possibility of the resurrection - I do - the story you have to believe about God demands a lot. It has been over 2000 years ago. The world has changed. To make someone's salvation depend on believing so improbable a story, to make salvation an epistemological problem! or a problem of interpreting an ancient text!, does not make sense to me. I have been thinking about these things for decades and I struggle. How can someone who cannot accept this story be blamed? Why would God make salvation dependent not on goodness, say, but the capacity to believe what to moderns is a story that doesn't make sense of God, though it may support a clergy?

    At bottom, I am saying that it would be unjust for God to make a person’s ultimate fate depend on accepting a proposition that is historically remote, epistemically difficult, and psychologically implausible in one’s intellectual context. This is very close to what Ivan Karamazov protests in The Brothers Karamazov, not about belief as such, but about a structure of reality that seems to place unbearable demands on finite creatures. If Christianity really meant “Believe this unlikely story or be damned,” then this objection would be devastating.

     But salvation can’t be an epistemological test. There is a popular form of Christianity (especially in certain Protestant strands) that does reduce things to assent to a set of propositions about specific historical events under the threat of eternal loss. But that formulation has always been contested, even within the tradition itself. Consider a different (and older) way of putting it: Salvation is not primarily about believing that something happened, but about being rightly related to the Good, the True, the Living God. On this view, doctrines are not arbitrary tests, but attempts to articulate what that reality is like. The resurrection, then, is a claim about the nature of reality and its ultimate hope. What the world must be like if our deepest desires are to be believed – like the funeral story I related earlier in its relation to belief in the immortality of the soul.

   Still, why this story, at that time, in that place, mediated through texts and traditions? Why should a 1st-century event in Roman Palestine become the axis of universal salvation? Contrast two models. First, the “Information Test” Model: God reveals a set of facts; humans must believe them; salvation depends on correct assent. This is the model I cannot accept. In the second model, God is the Good itself (something like what you find in Plato, Aquinas, Murdoch). Salvation is alignment with or participation in that Good. Historical revelation is an invitation or disclosure, not a test. Here a person can be oriented toward the Good without solving the historical puzzle. Failure to believe may reflect honest difficulty, not moral failure. I asked how can someone who cannot accept this story be blamed? On the second model, the answer would be that they are not blamed for intellectual non-assent as such. The deeper issue would be the rejection of truth as such, or refusal of the Good when it is genuinely encountered, which is of course very different from not finding the resurrection historically convincing enough. This would be to say that if a person sincerely seeks truth and goodness, but cannot honestly affirm the resurrection, that is not culpable unbelief. I am free to hope that Hitchens can be saved.

   Why not simply “Goodness alone,” then, as Gaita and Murdoch would have it? Why not make salvation depend simply on goodness? Aquinas agrees that goodness is central. But we are often confused about what goodness really is. And we are often unable to sustain it. Revelation is a clarification and empowerment of what the Good actually is. The resurrection, in that light, is not primarily “Believe this happened,” but “Death, evil, and injustice do not have the final word.”

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     The Resurrection as a "true disclosure of reality"? What does that mean? Start with the familiar. We already accept that reality shows itself in different modes, not all of which are reducible to scientific description. For example, in physics: reality is disclosed as quantifiable structure (mass, charge, motion); in personal encounter: reality is disclosed as a person, not reducible to data; in moral experience: reality is disclosed as binding or calling (“this is wrong,” “this must be done”); in beauty: reality is disclosed as worthy of contemplation or love. None of these are “irrational.” But they are not all the same kind of access. So already we live with a layered sense of “disclosure.” To say something is a disclosure of reality is to say that through this event, experience, or encounter, something about the nature of reality becomes visible that was not otherwise accessible. Not invented. Not projected.

     If one calls the resurrection a “true disclosure of reality,” one is not (at least not primarily) saying: “Here is a strange biological anomaly you must believe happened.” One is saying something more like in this event, reality shows itself to be such that death is not ultimate, the Good is not defeated,

and the structure of being is, at its deepest level, life-giving. In other words, the resurrection is not just a fact within reality, but a revelation about what reality ultimately is like.

     The Resurrection may thus not be treated like a mere story. A “mere story” would be expressive, meaningful, but not answerable to reality. A “true disclosure” claims this really happened, and what happened reveals something universally true. (History become myth or myth become history, as Lewis put it).  So the claim is doubly strong – historical (something occurred) and ontological (it shows what reality is).

       Think of falling in love. From the outside, it can be described in terms of hormones, behavior patterns, and evolutionary advantage. But from within, it is experienced as seeing something real about this person, something that calls for my response. Now imagine someone saying “That’s just your brain chemistry.” You might reply, if you were a certain kind of thinker, that no, though the experience of being in love something real is disclosed.  The claim is not irrational. It’s a claim about a different level of access to reality.

    The resurrection, if taken seriously, is an extreme version of this structure: not just experiencing something meaningful, but the intuition that reality itself has shown, in an event, that its ultimate nature is not exhausted by what we ordinarily observe. (A philosophy professor once warned us that when your argument has to rely on intuition, you are in trouble.) This is why neither the reduction to science or symbol must have the final word.

    Admittedly calling the resurrection a “true disclosure of reality” does not remove my earlier concern. One can still ask why such a disclosure would take this particular historical form, requiring interpretation, trust in testimony, and cultural mediation? That question remains unavoidable. But the expression does shift the issue from whether one can accept an improbable report to whether reality could be such that, at certain moments, it becomes manifest in ways that exceed ordinary expectations. Or whether if such a manifestation occurred, how would I recognize it, given my historical and conceptual limits.

    Perhaps a more philosophical way to put would be that the resurrection is an event in which the deepest truth about reality, its orientation toward life, goodness, and meaning, became visible in history.

 . . .

     If the resurrection is the ground for believing what it “discloses,” then rejecting the event seems to undercut the disclosure itself. Without the event, aren’t we left with a gap that can only be crossed by something like a Kierkegaardian leap?

     So the Church trusts on faith that the resurrection happened.Therefore, reality is as Christianity claims. Thus the inability to believe that the event happened in history collapses the meaning, and recovering the meaning would then require a leap. That is the Kierkegaardian situation in a strong sense.

   Or perhaps it could be like this: one has some prior sense (however inchoate) of the Good, truth, or reality. (My feeling during my grandmother's funeral that it is cold and unloving not the believe in the possibility of her continued existence in God.) The resurrection is then seen as fitting, as illuminating, as disclosing that reality. In that case, the event is not the sole foundation, but the meaning is also not independent of it. They interpret each other. If the first explication is the only option, then without accepting the resurrection, one lacks any rational bridge to what it claims. Hence, either one believes against the grain of reason, or one rejects the whole. But if second makes any sense, then one might have access to what the resurrection “points to” independently, though perhaps less fully. For example, the sense that goodness is not reducible to power. Or the intuition that love has a kind of ultimate authority. Or the experience that truth is not merely constructed. The kinds of things that are emphasized by Iris Murdoch or Raimond Gaita. Of course, these are not proofs of resurrection. But they are attuned with what the resurrection means such that the person who has such experiences might find it easier to believe in the Resurrection.

    Even in Kierkegaard, the “leap” is often misunderstood. He really doesn’t mean by it just believing something without a foundation. He means rather

committing oneself where objective certainty is unavailable in a situation where something has already gripped one as significant. So the leap is not into sheer darkness, but into a kind of lived coherence that cannot be fully secured in advance. At least in some formulations it is like this.

     Still, one could object that all those experiences of goodness, truth, love do not uniquely point to the resurrection. They are compatible with many metaphysical pictures. And that is true. So the resurrection remains underdetermined by experience, and therefore not rationally compelled. So Where Does That Leave Us? The resurrection is not a priori irrational (given a non-closed view of reality), but it is also not derivable from what we already know. Therefore, accepting it is neither a pure inference nor a blind leap, but something like a responsive judgment under uncertainty.

     Without the event, is the answer to “why believe this about reality?” missing? The resurrection, within Christianity, functions as a decisive sign, not merely an illustration. Without it, the picture of reality it supports becomes philosophically attractive perhaps, but lacking an anchor. That is precisely why Christianity insists on it so strongly, which is why it creates the difficulty many people feel. One might then hold that the vision of reality (Goodness, love, ultimate meaning) is independently compelling to some degree, as do Gaita and Murdoch. The resurrection is a proposed confirmation or disclosure of that vision, but one may remain agnostic about the event while still taking the vision seriously. This is not orthodoxy but it is not incoherent either. It defines my struggles. For me the options are full orthodoxy vs. a love of the Good without metaphysical anchoring (Gaita, Murdoch). There are trade-offs either way. If you accept the Resurrection, you get a coherent vision with the event at the cost of epistemic strain. If you detach Goodness from the Resurrection, you relieve that strain but lose the hope bound up with the event. Your love becomes tragic.

    My doubts, occurring within my faith, come from my conviction that faith must not violate the integrity of reason, fallible as reason is, mine more than others perhaps. If faith cannot be so lived, something is wrong. I know that when I think about my Platonic side, the vision of Goodness, love, reality not reducible to mechanism, I don’t feel secure without the Resurrection (and Incarnation). The vision feels fragile without God, and God is revealed though the Incarnation and Resurrection, through Christ. At least that is what my deeper intuitions point to even if my mind must be dragged along at times.

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    As Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, Christianity looks like a wild fairy tale and yet, when one lives with it, it seems to fit the contours of reality uncannily well. The story is a key that unlocks the meaning of Being. Chesterton makes sense when he writes that  the truth, if it comes from beyond us, would feel surprising, even disorienting. Because if reality ultimately exceeds us, then a fully “reasonable” religion, one that fits neatly into our expectations, might actually be too small. So the resurrection, in this light, is not just a difficult claim but the kind of claim one might expect if reality were more like a drama than a mechanical system.