Thursday, April 13, 2017

Ressurrection and Plausibility

    
        Yes, I think Jesus’ tomb was really found empty.
      And, yes, I know dead people usually don’t rise. Rumors of the raising of Lazarus and the widow of Nain’s Son, like the previous stories of Elijah and the widow of Zarapeth’s boy, are as rare in the Bible as today’s own resurrection reports continue to be comparatively rare.
       Yet, when I was in Chiapas, Mexico in 2009 a Presbyterian missionary shared how his experience there had changed what Peter Berger calls this man’s “plausibility structures.” The idea is that relationships and fundamental assumptions tend to make something seem more or less plausible.  This missionary came to trust a village who confirmed a mother’s story about her dead two-year-old being raised to life!  
      This should not be shocking.  Historically such stories have generally seemed quite possible.  They come from a variety of religious traditions, mirroring world-wide archetypal hopes. Earliest Christianity proclaimed that the mythical dying and rising God had entered history. Universal aspirations, written on the collective mind for millennia, were acted out in the history of Israel in a way that unleashed a newly creative power into the world.
      This seems implausible to secular people because of their mechanistic assumptions about the world.  The church needs to listen better to contemporary science, but I think some scientists need to realize that they are using dead metaphors to describe a world which is mysteriously conscious and open to renewal.   Rodney Brooks, a noted MIT scientist, who works in the field of robotics, for instance, thinks that human beings are “biochemical robots.” 
     That’s what I find implausible.  Brooks is a smart guy, but I think he suffers from what is a widespread crisis of imagination that can’t tell human consciousness apart from a robot because it’s been trained to see what is alive and pervaded by consciousness as merely a dead, chemical machine.  Surely at some level Brooks knows his thoughts are more than chemical reactions.   Surely he knows the processes he observes are open to surprise, and that he’s ignoring any testimony that doesn’t give his dead machine-world the last word.

      

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