"If you believe the Bible is true, then you have to believe that Jesus healed people and that he raised Lazarus from the dead." - Randy Alcorn
In her "Beliefwatch" column in the current issue of Newsweek, Lisa Miller discusses the orthodox Christian and Jewish belief in physical resurrection. Several contemporary Jewish and Christian luminaries are pushing the traditional doctrine that the transition to the afterlife includes a miraculous reversal of physical death.
She begins the article with a question that is often sidestepped by the faithful. "You likely believe that when you die, you're going to heaven. More than 80 percent of Americans do. But in what form?"
The orthodox commitment to physical resurrection obviously flies in the face of everything scientists currently believe about material reality. Physical events, virtually all scientists agree, are caused by other physical events, in an incalculably complex network of causal chains that reach back at least as far as the Big Bang.
But wait -- is causal law suspended for the dead? You betcha, says Randy Alcorn. After you die, your molecules miraculously reorganize into an immortal, but entirely physical, version of your present body. So says Alcorn in his bestseller Heaven.
Furthermore, that belief is an essential tenet of Christian faith. In good fundamentalist form, Alcorn heartily embraces the bizarre conclusions demanded by the premise that the bible is the revealed word of god.
Since Heaven was published in 2004, it has been printed 16 times and has sold 500,000 copies.
Believing in the physical reality of miracles, which are, by definition, occurrences outside the bounds of physical reality, demands an astonishing feat of credulity.
Alcorn's brain is truly amazing. It apparently keep him alive to cash his royalty checks, so it must accurately predict the causal properties of physical realities such as cars and impact. Yet, with apparent ease, it also sustains a model of the universe in which physical reality is independent of physical reality. Remarkable.
Of course, it's not really that surprising. Believing in the actuality of the impossible is at the heart of any view that extols the virtues of a supernatural realm. And that pretty much includes all religion. Read the original article here.