Objections to the historicity of the Resurrection are sure to come up. I can understand why people (me included) trust the historical sciences less (although perhaps we should hold other sciences to the same scrutiny since the methodology sections of many papers are absolute rubbish). However, the fact does remain that if we give no special treatment to the facts surrounding the resurrection and treat it the same as other historical events, then the totality of evidence would suggest that the resurrection did in fact happen. If we want to reject the conclusion, it seems there are two options: 1) cease to believe any historical events that we ourselves do not directly witness (after all, other eye witnesses could lie and videos can be faked and the voices in my head could be fake and the walls could be closing in and and oh my!), or 2) reject all historical events that cannot be explained naturalistically. Option 1 is obviously foolish and borders on some type of pseudo-liberal, revisionist dogma. One would be hard-pressed to find a scholar who holds this position, hence my sarcastic treatment. The second option seems to me to have some footing. However, there are plenty of "miraculous" events (e.g. the beginning of the universe) that cannot be explained through naturalistic causes. I actually accept this type of skepticism for historical events of which I only hold a superficial understanding. But again, the evidence surrounding the resurrection needs to be explained, and there is only one hypothesis with the necessary explanatory power to make sense of all the separate pieces of data: it actually happened.
Objections to the historicity of the Resurrection are sure to come up. I can understand why people (me included) trust the historical sciences less (although perhaps we should hold other sciences to the same scrutiny since the methodology sections of many papers are absolute rubbish). However, the fact does remain that if we give no special treatment to the facts surrounding the resurrection and treat it the same as other historical events, then the totality of evidence would suggest that the resurrection did in fact happen. If we want to reject the conclusion, it seems there are two options: 1) cease to believe any historical events that we ourselves do not directly witness (after all, other eye witnesses could lie and videos can be faked and the voices in my head could be fake and the walls could be closing in and and oh my!), or 2) reject all historical events that cannot be explained naturalistically. Option 1 is obviously foolish and borders on some type of pseudo-liberal, revisionist dogma. One would be hard-pressed to find a scholar who holds this position, hence my sarcastic treatment. The second option seems to me to have some footing. However, there are plenty of "miraculous" events (e.g. the beginning of the universe) that cannot be explained through naturalistic causes. I actually accept this type of skepticism for historical events of which I only hold a superficial understanding. But again, the evidence surrounding the resurrection needs to be explained, and there is only one hypothesis with the necessary explanatory power to make sense of all the separate pieces of data: it actually happened.