KevinScharp wrote:

Thanks, it's great to do this. I sort of live and breath this stuff right now, so it's nice to have an outlet.

General relativity predicts that the gravitational field around the Earth and all the other objects in the vicinity would be a certain way. If that prediction is right, then the spacetime around Jesus would be warped in a way that would result in him falling into the water. Yes, God could bend spacetime in some way that prevented Jesus from falling. But then spacetime wouldn't be the way predicted by general relativity. And so Jesus not falling would be incompatible with general relativity.

If God were adding mass/energy to the system, then the mass/energy after God's intervention would not be what is predicted by the conservation theory (given what the mass/energy was before the intervention). So the conservation theory would predict the wrong answer for after the intervention. So God's intervention would be incompatible with the conservation theory.

I'm not seeing the asymmetry to the Newtonian theory here. Newton's 1st law states, for instance, that every object at rest stays at rest unless a force acts upon it. Hence, Newton's laws don't predict one way or another whether, say, a orange basketball at rest is going to move or not; what it does predict, however, is that if a force does not act upon it, then it will stay at rest.

Similarly, doesn't relativity just say that as long as their are no other factors bending space-time, this is how it's going to be distributed? You allow that God could do so, hence, why is this not compatible with the theory's predictions?

KevinScharp wrote:

I wouldn't give up biology, but I'd give up conservation of mass/energy. And I'd want to know a lot more about the boundary between where God intervened and the rest of the universe.

Would you give up conservation of mass/energy? I would not, if I thought that the counterexample had a supernatural cause and was local.

To see why I think this, I want to revisit one of your earlier responses to Timocrates:

KevinScharp wrote:

First, I said nothing about laws of nature. I talked only about scientific theories. Here's what I said. Scientific theories have tons of evidence for them -- way more than any evidence for resurrection. And, moreover, resurrection is incompatible with our best scientific theories. So we should accept an explanation for the events mentioned (empty tomb, etc.) that is compatible with our best scientific theories.

The distinction between natural laws and scientific theories is crucial here. I don't know what the natural laws are because I don't know what results the sciences will eventually come up with. I do know what our best scientific theories are. I don't know whether resurrection is incompatible with natural laws. I do know that resurrection is incompatible with our best scientific theories. So the distinction matters, and I was very careful about it in my presentation and the discussion. 

I think it's worth positing scientific laws to get at natural laws. But when something has a non-natural cause, I am happy to admit that no natural law was violated (which gets at Timocrates' earlier point) and that I have no reason to throw out any of the scientific laws through which I get at natural laws. In other words, I don't abscond from the question of natural laws because I think they implicitly provide the scope for scientific theories.

KevinScharp wrote:

Nice punchline.

Nice snark.

KevinScharp wrote:

Science does explain some things -- like how objects move in gravitational fields. It doesn't explain other things, like morality (so no reductive naturalism). Resurrection is incompatible with the former.

How? Listen, I'm not even a Christian, and I'll grant you the denial of interesting reasons to believe in the occurance of miracles, but not on the ground of scientific "incompatibility". Let's just take Christian ontology seriously for the sake of argument: Christ is God incarnate.

I do not recall in reading about gravitational theory where God's powers are accounted for with respect to gravitation. What's God's mass and velocity? Apart from the obvious practical reasons why such a thing isn't mentioned, it couldn't even be covered in principle, since God is not a natural body. Ergo, God's Powers cannot be incompatible with natural science, because they are not even in principle covered in or restricted by nature.

So, now, back to Christ: it would be perfectly understandable to say that Jesus' resurrection is incompatible with what we understand about biology and etc if we were to concede that he was a mere human being. Indeed, I think even Christians would be willing to concede that if Jesus was a mere human being then it is unlikely that he was able to raise himself from the dead. But if Christ is God incarnate as Christianity holds him to be, it's not only not incompatible with science that he have wondrous powers, but not surprising either. Not only is there no being fundamentally like God in the universe which is covered by scientific explanation, but God isn't even a thing in the universe, so he couldn't even in principle be covered by any kind of Natural Science.

You have to presuppose some additional metaphysics about science, which are not necessary at all for science to be explanatory, to go ahead and assert that somehow God incarnate would be unable to have wondrous powers because of biology or some such. This is why Craig and others are willing to constantly accuse you and others of reductionism and naive physicalism, because that's where these arguments always drive to- a direction that would only be supported by some extreme metaphysical assumptions. That you can be faithful to science without evoking such metaphysics does not mean that your position is coherent without them.

But in any case classically the argument was never between:

1. Some mere human being, Jesus, despite all biological constraints on a person, died and contrary to everything we understand about how biology works, used his own natural body to return from the dead.

or

2. Human bodies cannot of their own power return to life, so Jesus the man didn't come back to life.

It is instead between:

A. God on earth, Jesus Christ, used his divine power to both die and return from the dead.

or 

B. There is no reason to believe the testimony about that event/good reason to disbelieve it.

iwpoe wrote:

You have to presuppose some additional metaphysics about science, which are not necessary at all for science to be explanatory, to go ahead and assert that somehow God incarnate would be unable to have wondrous powers because of biology or some such. This is why Craig and others are willing to constantly accuse you and others of reductionism and naive physicalism, because that's where these arguments always drive to- a direction that would only be supported by some extreme metaphysical assumptions. That you can be faithful to science without evoking such metaphysics does not mean that your position is coherent without them.

I think the bold statement iwpoe is making, and he can correct me if I'm wrong, is that science can only tell you something about the world and give substantial knowledge about it if and only if there is a metaphysic to support it. As such, if you're going to say that if 'x' has demonstrated a proposition 'y,' then you should be willing to argue the metaphysic on which it is built upon. Even if iwpoe's not making that point, I'm making that one. I do understand why people like Craig (after iwpoe's elucidation) are willing to bang on that door. So I'm all on-board with that line of critique.

Timotheos wrote:

I'm not seeing the asymmetry to the Newtonian theory here. Newton's 1st law states, for instance, that every object at rest stays at rest unless a force acts upon it. Hence, Newton's laws don't predict one way or another whether, say, a orange basketball at rest is going to move or not; what it does predict, however, is that if a force does not act upon it, then it will stay at rest.

Similarly, doesn't relativity just say that as long as their are no other factors bending space-time, this is how it's going to be distributed? You allow that God could do so, hence, why is this not compatible with the theory's predictions?

Yes, that's what Newton's first law states, but that's not how general relativity works. It isn't stated primarily as English principles like Newton's theory. Instead, it consists of a number of complex equations with constraints on which kinds of solutions make sense and how to interpret them. There is no part of the formulation that involves a ceteris paribus clause (e.g., other things being equal, or in the absence of other forces).

Notice that this is one place where my emphasis on scientific theories over natural laws is doing work. I couldn't make the same claim about a natural law because I'd have no justification for that claim.  But because scientific theories are human constructions that are open to inspection, we know that general relativity isn't formulated with a ceteris paribus clause. Anyway, I thought that might help explain my perspective on the topic a bit.