The Resurrection

[Sheldon]

couldn't find the word miracle in the Bible. You'll find terms such as wonders and signs, but the idea of a miracle appears to be external the Bible itself.

So powerful, amazing, significant things, but not necessarily supernatural. 

For clarity, is the thread author saying that no miracles have ever occurred? That they're just natural events we perceive as implausible, until we can explain them naturally and scientifically? 

Only I am cool with that, but it will likely be a problem for all the Abrahamic religions.

[Sheldon]

As for resurrection, you can pretty much forget it. A few people have been brought back from nearly dead due to extreme cold after several hours by careful warming, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and some serious voltage. The technique relies on the body shutting down at extreme low temperatures and being preserved by the cold, but odds are very poor even then. It's led to the phrase "They aren't dead until they're warm and dead."

Taking it back to the resurrection myth, well, best you stick with Divine Intervention. As Zebo has already pointed out, your real problem is going to be brain death, although serious damage to all the major organs will also occur pretty quickly. Without those deep cold temperatures that Jerusalem is famous for not having you're pretty much buggered. Brain damage becomes a worry at 2 minutes without oxygen being circulated and is all but guaranteed by 5 minutes. Those tiny neural connections that make you who you are start dying off and you pretty rapidly lose memory/function/the ability to keep your autonomous nervous system running. That stuff is simply irreparable, even by conceivable near-future technologies. There are a few drugs that might improve your window by a few minutes, but not many, and certainly nowhere near enough to fit the story. I have no idea when the major organs start packing it in from oxygen loss, most people are well and truly dead before then, but I wouldn't give it more than an hour before major damage sets in. After days in the tomb, you're looking at rigor mortis starting and ending and you should be well into putrefaction. What's left of the brain at that point would be a nasty-smelling slurry inside the skull.

 is there even a difference between resurrecting an individual and healing them? 

Yes obviously, since it is an objective fact that healing people is possible, but we have no objective evidence resurrections are possible, and they are at odds with other scientific facts.

[John 6IX Breezy]

We aren't looking at the loss of a few axons here, we're looking at wholesale mass cellular death across the entire brain. What you need to do is take that, find a point at which to begin the repairs, good luck with that BTW most of the cells that would aid in repair are also dead and decaying, and somehow work your way back to restoring the very fine-detail of exact synapse width, positioning, firing sensitivity, a host of molecules on and in the nerve cells that change the behavior of the neuron to help produce memory, etc. It's absurdly detailed work. And that's just the brain. Keep in mind that the rest of the body that you need to keep the brain working is similarly dead or dying on a cellular level.

It may appear to be absurdly detailed work, but the brain already has the ability to do it. If you sever the optic nerve of a frog, it'll find a way to reconnect all those millions of fine axons and restore vision.

Moreover, you've heard how your body replaces most of your cells every seven years. In other words, you're a living ship of theseus. So I'm not entirely sure hyperfocusing on restoring every single original cell is even necessary, maybe the answer is simply to replace them wholesale with spare cells. When you've lost blood we don't mop up every blood cell and put it back in, we just give you a new batch.

As a digression, what then are your thoughts on abiogenesis? Is it somehow easier for life to emerge by itself from scratch from the environment than it is for it to re-emerge in a cell with all the necessary components already there?

[Sheldon]

We aren't looking at the loss of a few axons here, we're looking at wholesale mass cellular death across the entire brain. What you need to do is take that, find a point at which to begin the repairs, good luck with that BTW most of the cells that would aid in repair are also dead and decaying, and somehow work your way back to restoring the very fine-detail of exact synapse width, positioning, firing sensitivity, a host of molecules on and in the nerve cells that change the behavior of the neuron to help produce memory, etc. It's absurdly detailed work. And that's just the brain. Keep in mind that the rest of the body that you need to keep the brain working is similarly dead or dying on a cellular level.

 Is it somehow easier for life to emerge by itself from scratch from the environment than it is for it to re-emerge in a cell with all the necessary components there?

This seems like another false equivalence to me. There is some objective evidence to support abiogenesis, though far from sufficient for it to be definitive. We have life existing as an objective fact, and we have asteroids with the building blocks of life on them. We have no objective evidence that a human can be resurrected, after all brain function has ceased for days.

[The Grand Nudger]

It may appear to be absurdly detailed work, but the brain already has the ability to do it. If you sever the optic nerve of a frog, it'll find a way to reconnect all those millions of fine axons and restore vision.

Moreover, you've heard how your body replaces most of your cells every seven years. In other words, you're a living ship of theseus. So I'm not entirely sure hyperfocusing on restoring every single original cell is even necessary, maybe the answer is simply to replace them wholesale with spare cells. When you've lost blood we don't mop up every blood cell and put it back in, we just give you a new batch.

As a digression, what then are your thoughts on abiogenesis? Is it somehow easier for life to emerge by itself from scratch from the environment than it is for it to re-emerge in a cell with all the necessary components already there?

Not brain cells.  Those are in limited supply. The ship is still apt, though. Just as their are minute variations that account for the differences between persons, there are even finer variations that account for the differences between one person over time.

No one thinks that life emerged by itself or from scratch.

[Mister Agenda]

It may appear to be absurdly detailed work, but the brain already has the ability to do it. If you sever the optic nerve of a frog, it'll find a way to reconnect all those millions of fine axons and restore vision.

Moreover, you've heard how your body replaces most of your cells every seven years. In other words, you're a living ship of theseus. So I'm not entirely sure hyperfocusing on restoring every single original cell is even necessary, maybe the answer is simply to replace them wholesale with spare cells. When you've lost blood we don't mop up every blood cell and put it back in, we just give you a new batch.

As a digression, what then are your thoughts on abiogenesis? Is it somehow easier for life to emerge by itself from scratch from the environment than it is for it to re-emerge in a cell with all the necessary components already there?

The brain doesn't have the ability to do it when its dead. Absent reversing time, you might be able to restore a dead brain with advanced nanotechnology, but would it truly be the same frog or just a very good copy?

I'm not very skeptical of the existence of an itinerant rabbi named Yeshua who ran afoul of Roman politics (my personal estimate is slightly over 50% that this person isn't entirely fictional or mere a composite of several characters) whose sayings were part of a new branch of Judaism and who had a reputation of being one of the wonder workers widely believed in at the time. It's far more likely that if his followers had real reason to think he was resurrected because he was seen walking around and talking after his reported death, it's because he wasn't really dead in the first place. He was supposedly taken down much sooner than normal for a crucifixion, perhaps he was in a deep coma instead of dead or even drugged into deep unconsciousness as part of a plot to rescue him. Unlikely, but not as unlikely as him actually being dead for three days and coming back to life.

[Angrboda]

People believed a lot of things on hearsay back then. There were few centralized repositories of information and only the elites had access to them. So a story that some even happened is not likely based upon direct eyewitness testimony. The great historians like Josephus and Thucydides weren't embedded with the troops and they weren't doing in-depth interviews with generals. Information in the Ancient world was largely second-hand. So if someone reported Christ's crucifixion, and that report was widely spread, his reappearance alive at a later time is not as remarkable as it sounds. Deaths were not uncommonly reported and later found to be based upon faulty information. It isn't like today's military where a soldier being killed in action can be reported by way of a reasonably robust chain of information transmittal.

[The Grand Nudger]

Magic book says there were no credible witnesses, and that christ only came back for a limited engagement at a small dinner party. The hypothetical fact of a resurrection (or a misreported death) is not the explanation for christian belief in the resurrection.

[Paleophyte]

It may appear to be absurdly detailed work, but the brain already has the ability to do it. If you sever the optic nerve of a frog, it'll find a way to reconnect all those millions of fine axons and restore vision.

No, it really doesn't. The regeneration of optic nerves in living amphibians is similar to patching a fiber optic line back together. It's messy and difficult, but in the end it's just a data transmission line. And even then the patch is imperfect. Kermit typically comes out of that experiment with a squint. The brain is a whole lot more complicated and you're going to have to repair it in a dead body. Not happening. To extend the analogy, it's like finding a data center and then setting off thermonuclear armageddon. The data center is a crater, the city it was in is ash, and the repair men are radioactive zombies. You won't be resurrecting ChatGPT from this rubble.

Moreover, you've heard how your body replaces most of your cells every seven years.

You've heard how corpses don't do that?

So I'm not entirely sure hyperfocusing on restoring every single original cell is even necessary

The plasticity of the human brain might allow you to get away with losing some small number of brain cells without significant loss, but we aren't talking a small number here. The entire brain and the supporting body are a nasty mass of decaying tissue.

maybe the answer is simply to replace them wholesale with spare cells. When you've lost blood we don't mop up every blood cell and put it back in, we just give you a new batch.

Sounds like pouring salt water into my keyboard to make my computer run faster. One of the notable features of corpses is their lack of spare cells. And even if you had any you still don't have a body to produce an environment (nutrients, oxygen, waste removal) where they'd do anything other than die alongside their brethren. And even if you did have a functioning body, the new cells wouldn't be forming the same connections that the old ones had. So no, that won't work.

As a digression, what then are your thoughts on abiogenesis? Is it somehow easier for life to emerge by itself from scratch from the environment than it is for it to re-emerge in a cell with all the necessary components already there?

From scratch. I doubt that the latter would even count as abiogenesis. Cells are good at devouring foreign material and would be a lousy place to try and form novel life. So much easier to climb a ladder when there's nobody above you constantly dropping bricks on your head and jumping on your fingers.

[The Grand Nudger]

Christian apologists are conditioned to conflate their own mistaken ideas about the origin of life with scientific theories which share the same name as they are corrections to the assertion in the history of western philosophy and science, currently ongoing.

It's a hell of a spectacle...as the argument takes the form of "you'd have to be a fool to believe this ridiculous shit we believe"....which...yeah, fact check true.