Where Everybody's Crazy

I don't tend to like apologetics, and I think last night I realised another reason why not. I think it's because, at bottom, apologetics is an attempt to persuade the other person of the rationality of your position. And this is always a losing proposition, because if they're not convinced of your rationality, then how are they going to be convinced by your reasoning? The starting point is just too far apart. So I don't tend to go in for apologetics, and prefer to let the Holy Spirit get on with His job and I get on with mine. I only tend to do apologetics when something annoys me. Like last night.

How can I possibly, I was asked, believe in things which require the breaking of the laws of the universe? This annoyed me because it was an attempt to make me look unscientific, while the objection itself is actually based on unscientific premises - it's based on an understanding of the character of physical law which comes from a deterministic scientism which is the enemy of scientific enquiry. It assumes that physical law is hard-coded into the universe and cannot be broken. It is not hard-coded into the universe. It is hard-coded into our heads.

Physical law is a set of inferences drawn by induction on observed phenomena. See that? "Observed phenomena". If the observations falsify the law, it's not a law any more. When we found that the earth goes around the sun, this was a breach of the laws as we knew them. But we did not berate the observations. Well, I'm sure we did for a while, but in the end, we changed the laws. Scientism says that observations must be in accordance with the laws; science says that the laws must be in accordance with the observations. Scientism says that physical law simply cannot be broken; science say that when it is broken, it stays broken. That's why I say that scientism is the enemy of scientific enquiry. By discounting the possibility that observations are outside the law, there is no way that the "laws" can be changed or improved.

Now I am not saying that the resurrection of Jesus was the result of physical processes we don't understand yet. I'm just fed up with the worldview of the questioner, really, and seriously dispute the concept that his understanding is more "scientific" than mine. I think the resurrection of Jesus cannot be explained physically, because it is the very job of science to find a natural explanation to something and my contention is that this was a supernatural event and so you're not going to find a natural explanation. If you're going to get all dogmatic and say that supernatural events simply cannot happen, then good luck to you, but don't call me closed-minded.