(February 6, 2025 at 12:09 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: The resurrection often gets touted as the point at which Christians depart from reality. Atheists may, for example, be open to most points about Jesus' existence up until the resurrection. Together with the virgin birth, these are the famous miracles which are traditionally seen as bending credulity and reality.

However, I've never had issues believing they could happen regardless of whether they did. Reality is often more mind-bending than theory. For example, prior to IVF technology, intercourse was the only rational route for pregnancy; and as such the virgin birth had to be believe on faith alone. Today, we have growing technology that can produce embryos from two males and no mother.  On a scale of incredulity, the virgin birth should rank lower than double-father-no-mother births, and yet the latter is reality, and the former is stigmatized as irrational.

And so, do you believe resurrections are possible in theory or even probable in practice?

ps. My question is not about the historicity of the Resurrection but rather about the theory and science of it (hence why this is posted in philosophy not religion).

You seem to be hung up on the resurrection of jesus.

Why don’t you talk about the saints that resurrected?

Matthew 27:52-28:20
King James Version
52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,
53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

h4ym4n Wrote:Why don’t you talk about the saints that resurrected?

Or John the Baptist's resurrection (Mk 6,14; Mk 6, 16). In the Bible the resurrections are as common as people in the real world buying wrist watches.

John 6IX Breezy Wrote:Atheists may, for example, be open to most points about Jesus' existence up until the resurrection.

Um, no. There are plenty of impossibilities in Jesus's life to take him for granted, like feeding 5000 people with five loafs of bread, census where people need to travel, quick trial at night during which he is beaten, killing of 20000 pigs, or when Jesus says to a guy one or two sentences and he leaves his life and family to follow him, and so on.

John 6IX Breezy Wrote:My question is not about the historicity of the Resurrection but rather about the theory and science of it

In quantum world information can not be destroyed, like if you burn a paper book some of it turns to smoke and some in ash, but you could in theory gather all the atoms and put them together as they once were, but there is no known way to do it. I guess that's how teleporters in the Star Trek work: they disassemble a person (thus killing him) and then reassemble him on a different location.

What part does Jesus' divinity play in this? If I take the atoms that made up Jesus while alive and reassemble them in the same form, does the reassembled Jesus resume being divine?

That would seem to require that Jesus' divinity consists of parts, that it doesn't leave the material it imbues, and so forth. A similar question would be, if I artificially assemble a child, will it acquire a soul?

Yeah, it's hard to talk about these stuff since they never occur. But if you derive this resurrection "science" from the Bible, Christians demand that people bury dead people in the ground so that when the day of resurrection comes, people can resurrect, meaning that they usually don't even allow cremation since they won't be able to assemble. For example, the Catholic church didn't allow cremation until something like 1997, and even now it's murky. But then they also seem to ignore that people decompose to "nothingness" even when they are buried. I guess the whole idea was based on the promise that the end of days will be soon, definitely before people decompose.

(February 9, 2025 at 10:51 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Yeah, it's hard to talk about these stuff since they never occur. But if you derive this resurrection "science" from the Bible, Christians demand that people bury dead people in the ground so that when the day of resurrection comes, people can resurrect, meaning that they usually don't even allow cremation since they won't be able to assemble. For example, the Catholic church didn't allow cremation until something like 1997, and even now it's murky. But then they also seem to ignore that people decompose to "nothingness" even when they are buried. I guess the whole idea was based on the promise that the end of days will be soon, definitely before people decompose.

Considering the number of heretics they’ve immolated over the centuries, it’s hard to understand the Church’s hesitancy about cremation. 

Boru

(February 9, 2025 at 10:51 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Yeah, it's hard to talk about these stuff since they never occur. But if you derive this resurrection "science" from the Bible, Christians demand that people bury dead people in the ground so that when the day of resurrection comes, people can resurrect, meaning that they usually don't even allow cremation since they won't be able to assemble. For example, the Catholic church didn't allow cremation until something like 1997, and even now it's murky. But then they also seem to ignore that people decompose to "nothingness" even when they are buried. I guess the whole idea was based on the promise that the end of days will be soon, definitely before people decompose.

I doubt that any kind of thought process like that went into it.  It's far older, much more basic.  Goes back 200k, multiple instances of independent construction all over the world and through time. Based on kinship, affinity, proximity, and dreams. Someone burnt to ash is gone in a meaningful sense that someone buried nearby (preserved or not - customs vary) is not. The preference didn't survive cultural contamination as christianity marched across the map. As you note, as an institution, catholicism only recently "allowed" this or that thing it's constituents have been doing for centuries...some of them unbroken from the pre-christian era in the respective cultures.

The difference between preferences themselves appears to be environmental.

(February 8, 2025 at 8:17 pm)Belacqua Wrote:

Quote:Empiricism cannot prove itself because, by its own definition, all knowledge comes from sensory experience, so there is no sensory experience that could verify the statement "all knowledge comes from sensory experience" - essentially creating a circular logic where the very idea of empiricism relies on an unprovable assumption about the source of knowledge itself; it's a classic "chicken and egg" problem within the philosophy of knowledge. 

and this one:

Quote:The idea that "empiricism can't prove empiricism" means that the very concept of relying solely on sensory experience to gain knowledge (empiricism) cannot be verified through sensory experience alone, creating a paradox; essentially, to prove that experience is the only source of knowledge, you would need to use some form of reasoning or intuition which goes beyond mere experience, contradicting the core tenet of empiricism itself. 

It's similar with materialism. Materialists begin with the idea that only the material is real, so a materialist experiment which only accepts materialist methods and materialist results as reliable will rule out non-materialist answers a priori. 

I think you misunderstand both empiricism and materialism because of your background in philosophy. I see it as a case of Maslow's hammer, though I may be mistaken.

Empiricism and materialism are proven by getting reliable results. Neither have to prove themselves metaphysically to philosophers, that being the case. That's why both are considered knowledge. In contrast, other methods (religion, inspiration, intuition, philosophy, or whatever) do not yield reliable results. That's why they don't qualify as knowledge anymore.

So what empiricists and materialists actually claim is that only their methods are reliable, by our experiences with those methods and with others. There is no reason to exclude other methods up front, but they are abandoned along the way when they are shown to be unreliable (as the histories of scholarship and science have shown).

However, you are correct that there is no reason to continue this digression.

(February 9, 2025 at 1:55 pm)Alan V Wrote:

(February 8, 2025 at 8:17 pm)Belacqua Wrote: and this one:


It's similar with materialism. Materialists begin with the idea that only the material is real, so a materialist experiment which only accepts materialist methods and materialist results as reliable will rule out non-materialist answers a priori. 

I think you misunderstand both empiricism and materialism because of your background in philosophy.  I see it as a case of Maslow's hammer, though I may be mistaken.

Empiricism and materialism are proven by getting reliable results.  Neither have to prove themselves metaphysically to philosophers, that being the case.  That's why both are considered knowledge.  In contrast, other methods (religion, inspiration, intuition, philosophy, or whatever) do not yield reliable results.  That's why they don't qualify as knowledge anymore.

So what empiricists and materialists actually claim is that only their methods are reliable, by our experiences with those methods and with others.  There is no reason to exclude other methods up front, but they are abandoned along the way when they are shown to be unreliable (as the histories of scholarship and science have shown).

However, you are correct that there is no reason to continue this digression.

So empiricism is confirmed using the methods of empiricism which demonstrates that empiricism is sound if empiricism is sound.

Circular logic much, bro?

(February 9, 2025 at 1:55 pm)Alan V Wrote: So what empiricists and materialists actually claim is that only their methods are reliable, by our experiences with those methods and with others.

Yes, this is fair. We have found these to be reliable in use.

(February 9, 2025 at 2:07 pm)Angrboda Wrote: So empiricism is confirmed using the methods of empiricism which demonstrates that empiricism is sound if empiricism is sound.

Only in that we'd need empiricism to determine if a result is valid or not. It's pretty easy to see that certain methods consistently provide results while others don't. Unless there's been a faith-based rocket launch that I missed?